The future war, p.11
The Future War, page 11
Sarah examined the mental image, not sure how she felt about it. I don’t think I’m ready to be a grandmother, she thought. Then an image of Dieter laughing uproariously at these absurd musings popped into her head.
God! But she was going to miss those two.
Missouri
Captain Yanik pulled the paper from the machine and read the dispatch. His eyebrows went up; good news for a change.
From: CONUS CentCom
To: Captain Charles Yanik, Black River Relocation Camp
Subject: Rogue Trucks
Faults in rogue vehicles due to “noise” overriding computer’s internal command structure causing vehicles to engage in random, but lethal manner.
While correcting problem technicians have devised method of making self-driving trucks function w/o drivers. Currently reduced traffic makes S/DTs more efficient than human drivers. Once route is programmed into computer truck will safely deliver any cargo in least time over best possible route.
Complement of fifteen trucks en route to Black River Relocation Camp. Freeing troopers for other duties. END MESSAGE
Such as what? Yanik wondered, looking around at the raw pine boards of the command shack.
Though he suspected that they’d be put to police work. Regular police forces were overwhelmed. Now that the cooperative citizens were in the camps, the criminal element was having a field day breaking and entering, burgling, and committing arson.
Who the damn fools think they’re gonna fence a TV to is beyond me. If there were any fences still operating out there, they were probably more interested in full gas cans or cases of soup. Bet you can keep your diamonds, though, Yanik thought, smiling.
He glanced through the open door and almost ran for his office when he saw Lieutenant Reese coming. He forced himself to stand and wait. The man was only coming to see if there were any orders waiting for him. Which there never were.
“Sir,” Reese said smartly, giving a crisp salute. Yanik returned it, less crisply. “There’s been no change, Lieutenant. And the no-personal-messages-allowed orders still stand.”
Reese looked taken aback. “I’m not trying to send a personal message, sir. I’m just trying to get assigned to where I’ll do the most good. I’m wasted here.”
“I disagree,” the captain told him. Reese might have talents that could be used elsewhere, but he was a very good officer and he most certainly wasn’t wasting his time. “You’ve been an asset here, Lieutenant. And I’ve sent your query up the line. They know where you are and what you can do, and when they want you they’ll tell you. In the meantime, I’m in need of competent officers.”
Reese lowered his eyes. “Yes, sir.”
Yanik studied him from under lowered eyebrows. “Probably they’ve hardly even begun the assessment phase of things, Reese. It may be months before they’ll need your training.” He dropped the message in his hand onto a pile to be filed. “Don’t worry, you’ll have your weeks without sleep. In the meantime, I’m told that some of the inmates have set up a still somewhere. In the interest of keeping the peace and keeping them from poisoning themselves and others, I’d like you to find it and get rid of it.”
“Yes, sir.” Reese paused. “They’ll only set up another one, sir.”
Yanik was studying another message. “Think I don’t know that, Lieutenant?” He looked up. “We have to keep the civilians entertained somehow.”
Black River Relocation Camp Clinic
Mary Shea made a notation on a patient’s chart and moved to the next bed; they were using a series of double-wides, together with sheds and tents and—she suspected—parts from prefabricated chicken coups, but at least they kept off the rain and had floors. Everything else in camp was gluey mud; the air in the clinic smelled better, of course. They were using bulk bleach salvaged from a cleaners as a make-do disinfectant.
She inserted an old-fashioned mercury thermometer under the patient’s tongue and took his pulse; the skin was a little clammy and moistly warm. It was a bit fast. His temperature was a hundred and one, down a bit. Unfortunately she thought it would go up again come sundown.
The sanitation in this hastily flung together camp worried her—a lot. It was grossly inadequate for the number of people here, and for all they were supposed to be a supply center, the clinic was constantly running out of the most basic supplies. She suspected that this patient’s illness was a water-related one, possibly cholera; the diarrhea indicated that—strongly—but they wouldn’t know for sure until they got the results back from the lab. And the lab was in worse shape than the clinic.
The nutrition wasn’t very good either. Beans and rice, mostly. Sometimes she absolutely craved meat; it was like her teeth were begging her to let them chew animal protein.
When the camp did get meat, the doctors and nurses insisted that a large portion of it be given to the hospital, before the rest was made available to the camp at large. The broths they made were a great help to the patients and they made sure that any pregnant or nursing mothers got a share of the meat.
The smell of cooking soup or roasting meat actually made her drool. And coffee, God, if she could only have a cup of coffee!
The next patient was an elderly woman with a very high fever, nausea, and very bad diarrhea. She complained of pains in her joints and headache as well. Dr. Ramsingh had gone to the HQ to talk to the captain about this. Two patients was hardly an epidemic, but these suggestive symptoms couldn’t be ignored.
The old lady looked up at her with fever-bright eyes when Mary put the thermometer under her tongue.
“Don’ wann be a burthen,” she said.
“You’re not,” Mary assured her. “You’ll be fine soon.”
She certainly hoped so. That there might be cholera in this camp was inexcusable. These people would be better off in their own homes rather than here, risking the spread of a deadly disease.
Many people, she knew, had argued against these—no other word for it—concentration camps. She’d heard the army’s argument that it was more efficient, but any place so badly constructed that a cholera epidemic threatened the population in less than a month was hardly a model of organization.
Though to be fair—she patted the old woman’s hand and moved on—if the pathetic trickle of supplies coming into the camp represented the best the government could do, then civilians on their own would quickly starve.
The problem was there was no news available to them except what they got from the army. Mary couldn’t help but feel uneasy at being reduced to one source of news; there was no way of cross-checking anything. Not that the government was giving them a very sunshiny outlook. To hear the army tell it, the world beyond the borders of the camp was a radioactive cinder. Which we can see with our own eyes isn’t true. So why was the army telling them that?
There was a commotion at the head of the ward and Mary looked up.
“This is the hospital ward,” the matron was explaining. “You have to take them to the clinic.”
“Don’t tell us to take them somewhere else,” a man was saying, shouting, actually. “Can’t you see they’re sick?”
“Help us!” the woman beside him said desperately.
Mary headed toward them. Oh God, she thought, it’s children. One of them a babe in arms, the other about the size of a four-year-old. Her gut went cold. Cholera was very hard on the very young and the very old. Her eyes met the matron’s and they made a mutual executive decision.
“If one of you will stay with Matron and help her fill out a chart, I’ll help the other put these children to bed.” Mary put the tray on the desk and held out her arms.
The man and woman glanced at each other, then the man held out the child he was carrying; a boy, Mary saw. She took him and led the woman down the ward toward a pair of cribs that Mary now thought insanely optimistic of whoever had put this place together. Just two, she thought sadly.
“What are their symptoms?” she asked the mother. She didn’t need to be told “fever”; she could feel it burning through the blanket. Ice, she thought, where are we going to get ice?
“Diarrhea,” the mother said, her voice shaking. “It just won’t stop.”
It was the symptom Mary had most dreaded hearing. She efficiently stripped and cleaned the little boy and put a Pampers on him. Those aren’t going to last long, she thought bitterly. She’d have to organize some of the civilians to help out with the laundry. Things were about to get high maintenance around here.
The thing was, where was the fuel to boil all this water going to come from? They’d have to send men out to cut down trees, then chop the wood, then make the fires and tend them. At least it would keep people busy. Those who stayed healthy. The question was how many of them had the disease already working its way into their systems.
She listened to the near-panicked mother as she started listing the symptoms all over again. Mary gave the woman a second look, noted the hectic flush, the too-bright eyes. Help! she thought, as short and desperate a prayer as she’d ever prayed.
Mary brought a chair over and sat the mother down. “Conserve your strength,” she cautioned. “You’re going to need it.” Then she went to the supply cabinet and came back with some bottles of water boosted with vitamins and electrolytes. “Get them to drink as much of these as possible,” she instructed. “I know they’re sick to their stomachs and won’t want it, but they need it, so get it down them.” She put a couple of facecloths and a bottle of alcohol down on a bedside table. “When they get too hot, wipe them down with this. I’ll be back shortly.”
As she headed down the aisle, the father was coming toward her, all his anxious attention on his wife and children. She and the matron stared at each other for a moment.
“Go tell Doctor,” Matron ordered. “I’ll look after things here.”
Alaska
Once again Ninel rode her bike up the overgrown driveway to Balewitch’s pleasant cottage. She’d been off-line, except to check her own site, for the last three weeks. There’d been her traps to mend and oil and put away until next winter, skins to see to, and the garden plot to clear of winter debris in preparation for planting. Ninel thought it would be a while before she’d trust the weather enough to put in seeds, though. She had some seedlings started in the cold frame she’d built, but it had been so cold lately that Ninel was sure she’d put them in too soon.
It was surprising that no one had sent her any e-mail in such a long time. But a brief check had shown that there wasn’t much activity anywhere. Still, that happened sometimes, the occasional dry spell that occurred for no known reason. What worried her was that she had expected to hear from Balewitch, or someone she had delegated.
This was the second time she’d paid an unscheduled visit; Ninel hoped someone would be home. She turned into the curve of the driveway, and through the trees she could see the older woman standing on her steps, clearly waiting for her.
She doesn’t look any too pleased to see me, Ninel thought. Maybe she should have tried again to contact Balewitch before coming. But several messages had gone unacknowledged, so there hadn’t seemed to be any point to trying again.
“Do you have any idea what’s going on in the world?” Balewitch said by way of greeting.
“Excuse me?”
“You don’t, do you?” Balewitch descended the steps, then sat down on them. “What have you been doing?”
Ninel looked at her, trying to figure out what this was about. She’d tried to contact the woman. It wasn’t like she’d left home with no forwarding address. “I’ve been busy,” she said at last.
Balewitch looked at her in disbelief, then laughed, long and heartily. “I guess you have been,” she said at last.
Ninel was not even slightly amused by this sort of behavior. She wondered if the woman had been laughing at Ninel’s expense all along. “I think maybe I’ve made a mistake.” She turned the bike around.
“Don’t get on your high horse, honey,” Balewitch said.
The woman’s voice was so unlike the voice she usually used that Ninel whipped round suddenly, almost tripping over her bike. She stared at Balewitch wide-eyed.
“Thing is, I know you’re connected to the Internet, so I’m wondering how you could possibly have missed the event of the millennium,” Balewitch said, eying her suspiciously.
“I only got on to check for e-mail,” Ninel said. “I did check a few other places, but there was no activity and nobody answered my queries.” She shrugged. “I had work to do.”
Balewitch shook her head. “Sheesh. While you were doing your chores World War Three was going on.”
Ninel gave her a worried frown. “Excuse me?” she said.
“Armageddon, the Apocalypse, global thermonuclear war? You’ve heard these terms before, yes?” The girl’s expression was priceless, her pale eyes were like saucers, it was all Balewitch could do not to laugh at her.
Ninel stared, then stretched her neck out in an unmistakably questioning manner.
“No, sleeping beauty, I’m not kidding and I’m not crazy, either.” Balewitch shook her head. “Your lack of curiosity astounds me.”
“But…?” Ninel looked up at the sky. Suddenly its overcast look and the colder weather made an awful sort of sense.
“How could you not know?” Balewitch raised an eyebrow.
“Like I said, lack of curiosity.” A very useful attribute under certain circumstances. This little girl was looking more useful by the minute. “Can you handle a gun?”
“Yes.”
“Good, because you shouldn’t be without one from this point forward. When people think the cops aren’t coming, they tend to do things they ordinarily wouldn’t.” The poor kid looked stricken.
“What’s going to happen now?” Ninel asked.
Balewitch considered her. “An associate of mine and I have been doing outreach work with the army,” she began. The girl gave her that same, bug-eyed questioning look. “Yeah, ironic, isn’t it? When I was your age I was so antimilitary I could hardly sleep for hating them. But we actually need them now.” She chuckled. “I guess disaster makes strange bedfellows.”
“But they did this,” Ninel said.
“Nope. Turns out Ron Labane was right. That super-computer of theirs malfunctioned. As soon as they turned everything over to it, it blew up everything in the arsenal. Damn fools!”
Oh, she was enjoying this, the kid was eating it up.
Ninel frowned. “Is there anything I can do to help?” she asked.
Balewitch was nodding. “I don’t see why not. I’m getting tired, and so’s my friend. We can use some help. If you could be this out of touch even though you’re regularly on the computer, then there must be tons of people in the back of beyond who need to be told. Not only told, but escorted to the relocation camps.”
“What?” Ninel actually reared back at that. “Relocation camps? I don’t like the sound of that.”
“Neither did I,” Balewitch agreed. “But we may not actually get a summer up here this year and winter is gonna be a stone bitch. Essential supplies are already growing scarce; who knows what it will be like by winter. Even the Eskimos will freeze from what they’re telling me, and Ron agrees with them.” She shook her head. “Like I said, ironic.”
It made sense, sort of. Ninel had heard of the nuclear winter theory. According to what she’d read, the dust and smoke created by the nuclear blasts might render this latitude uninhabitable for as long as three years. She supposed it wasn’t something that should be chanced, at least not the first year.
“What can I do to help?” she asked.
Balewitch smiled and rose from the step. “Come inside and I’ll tell you all about it.”
John drove up on his dirt bike to find their recruits packing up. “What’s going on?” he asked.
Paul the vegan came over and handed him a sheet of paper.
Citizens of Alaska, due to ongoing emergency conditions, the U.S. government is asking for your cooperation.
Experts have predicted that Alaska will experience an unparalleled winter this year and possibly for several years to come.
In order to protect yourselves and your families from these unusually harsh conditions, the U.S. Army has constructed temporary shelter for you in the warmer states below the fourty-ninth parallel. This will also allow a more evenhanded and efficient distribution of already scarce supplies.
Citizens in your area are requested to gather in Delta Junction or Tanacross, where transportation will be provided to take you to a temporary shelter in Canada, run in cooperation with the Canadian government, prior to removing you to the southern states of the U.S.
Temporary shelters have been erected in these towns in the event that you arrive after a convoy has left. Rest assured that your wait will be short and though the facilities may be rough, they will be better in the U.S. and Canada.
It was signed by some general. John’s muscles tightened in fight-or-flight reflex and he could feel adrenaline coursing into his bloodstream. Calm, he told himself. Be calm or they won’t listen to you at all.
John couldn’t believe how fast Skynet had swung into action. How many people has it already managed to exterminate? he wondered.
Of course everything in the broadsheet was so plausible; the suggestion of nuclear winter might even be true. No doubt that was why the army was cooperating. Individual soldiers and isolated commanders had no way of checking this out. They were getting their orders in the usual way, with the usual codes—hell, maybe they were even hearing the right voices. He sensed that a lot of people were going to die before they discovered their mistake.
“Where did this come from?” John asked.
“A young woman brought it,” Paul told him. “Said she was part of an outreach program working in conjunction with the army. They’re looking for survivors in the outback. People like us who are out of communication.” He gave John a long, hard look.
