The Memories of Milo Morai

IX

While they skinned a young bison and dressed the carcass for easy packing back to camp, Milo and Wahrn Mehrdok mindspoke one to the other.

“Irrigation problems or none, Wahrn,” beamed Milo, “not anywhere near all of your people are going to want to wander off to lead the lives of nomad herders . . . not after they find out just how brutal such a life often is, anyway. Your womenfolk, in particular, are mostly going to prefer the known hardships to those as yet unknown, that’s just the nature of females, you can’t fight it.

“And becoming nomads is not a thing you can do overnight, anyhow. I’m informed that your cattle, for instance, are fat, short-legged, short-horned beasts of a sort that would not survive even a single season, having been bred to be too slow to outrun predators and too clumsy and near-hornless to fight them. You folks are going to have to start breeding them for more horn, more leg, more muscle and less fat; better yet, start interbreeding them with Horseclans cattle—they’re not at all pretty and they produce rather small quantities of milk, compared to yours, while their beef is usually tough and stringy, but they do survive, Wahrn, they survive heat, cold, dust, flies, floods, droughts and predators of every size, and they do it all on grasses, weeds, wild grain and herbs.

“In that regard, at least, you’re in luck, for one of the two clans thatis headed this way boasts the largest herd of cattle of any Horseclan of which I know. I feel certain that Big Djahn, chief of Clan Staiklee, would be delighted to allow your herds to mingle freely with his . . . but be certain to permanently mark your cattle, for he occasionally forgets just which cattle are his and which the property of others. Indeed, it is often remarked among the more southerly-roaming clans that a fair proportion of his herd are ‘previously owned’ cattle.

“But cattle are his only weakness, Wahrn. In all other respects, he is a fine, brave and very honorable man, a chief of note, a war leader of rare talents. Are you to become a Horseclans chief, you might do far worse than to emulate such a man, in all ways save his one, very personal weakness, of course.”

Then Mehrdok asked, “Milo, why did it have to be destroyed, that pleasant, easy world that preceded our own? Why did those uncountable numbers of people have to die so suddenly and so miserably? Can you, with all your long years of life, tell me why?”

“To begin, Wahrn, that now-ancient world was not all of it as easy and pleasant as you have surmised. The great nation that once covered a fair proportion of this continent was perhaps one of the most blessed and prosperous of all that had ever existed, anywhere, but even within it there existed folk who lived hard, meaningless, hand-to-mouth lives, as had their parents before them and as would their children after. Also, during the century preceding the demise of that world, there was never a time when at least one war was not being waged somewhere, in some nation, for some reason or none; for then, as now, the races of mankind were aggressive, predatory and rapacious, and too, in that time and world, there was the problem of too many people and not enough arable land on which to grow food for them all.

“Added to the coveting of other people’s lands was the insatiable desire to dominate all folk, everywhere, which was the driving force of those peoples who called themselves by such names as Communists, Socialists, Fascists, Nazis and the like. These people not only practiced open aggression against other peoples, they also often fomented the lunatic activities of terrorists and revolutionaries in large and small nations all over the world, in the hope that the nations so afflicted would become sufficiently weakened to fall to their arms and armies or to the internal subversion of their hordes of agents within the very governments of target nations.

“All over that old world, Wahrn, folk were leaving the land to crowd in their millions into cities—towns that were miles long and wide—all completely dependent on food, water, fuel and all else being brought from far away and therefore all living within a week or less of starvation and want. In good times, that precarious balance could usually be maintained, but in times of widespread natural disasters, rioting and other civil disorders such as the planned disorders called ‘strikes,’ the chain of supply was sundered and people suffered terribly until it was repaired.

“You see, it was not the so-called war that extir-pated that old world and nearly exterminated all of the races of mankind, but rather the side effects of that hostile exchange, Wahrn. Yes, a very few of the incredibly destructive missiles hurled at the nation that once was here did strike and either destroy their targets or render them uninhabitable for long periods of time. However, the vast majority of those weapons were destroyed in flight, high, high up in the sky, by defenses designed and emplaced for that sole purpose. Yes, tens of millions died in various nations around that world, but earlier wars had been as or almost as costly, and hundreds of millions survived the immediate effects of the missiles, so the world might have picked up the pieces and gone on—an earlier world would have done just that, a world that did not have so many of its people jammed cheek by jowl in un-healthy cities and frightfully vulnerable to contagion, starvation, and the panic bred of unreasoning terror.

“There were those, then, who thought that the plagues were a result of some form of chemical war-fare, and some of them may well have been just that. Who, now, will ever know the truth of the matter? But I have always been of the opinion that they were simply new mutations of older plagues, for they moved around the vast expanses of that old world with almost unbelievable rapidity, took hold and slaughtered in areas that had not been attacked by anyone, that still were well fed, living in peace and order.

“The selectivity of those plagues was very puzzling, though, Wahrn. Races that were completely wiped out in some parts of the world were the sole survivors in others. In a few places, women and children and old people were the first to die, the adult men not succumbing until months later, while other scattered localities suffered just the reverse.

“Those plagues did their fair share and more of killing of prideful mankind, but they were not the only killers then stalking about; no, starvation took terrible toll, and other more mundane diseases and injuries cost innumerable lives due to a dearth of medicines and those trained in the use of them. Others died in flareups of warfare that went on as long as there were enough fighters to field and weapons with which to arm them. And even after the national or ethnic armies were become a thing of the dead past, packs of well-armed scavengers made life exceedingly miserable for those survivors they did not kill outright, when they had done robbing and raping them. So long as any sort of order, of governmental authority, existed, attempts were made to keep these packs of scavengers and looters away from as many places as possible with such few police and military personnel as remained; I would surmise that your ancestors were just such a force, sent here to protect the people then living here from the roving gangs of spoilers.

“I ran into just such a group, a unit of the California State Guard, on just such a mission, early on in the death of the old world. Not knowing just who I was or what I was about and assuming the worst, they shot me and left me for dead . . . which is just what any normal man would have soon been. I’ve never faulted them for it—they were trying to follow their orders, to do a hard, in the end an impossible, job the best they knew how to do it, and after sixty days of living off the land in the Sierra, I’m certain that I looked as wild and as woolly as anyone they had come across up until then. I played the part of a good corpse until that unit had moved on out of sight, then went on about my business.

“A few days after that incident, I lucked across an isolated, very affluent home hidden away in a small canyon in the foothills. None of the people who had lived there had been dead long, and I dragged their bodies out and buried them, then moved in. That dead family had apparently believed in preparing for any eventuality and had clearly been sufficiently affluent to prepare thoroughly, in depth.

“The home was far larger than it looked, more comfortable and richly appointed inside than the outside would lead anyone to believe. Behind the house itself was an underground garage housing three all-terrain vehicles, a well-equipped shop facility, a good-sized gasoline-powered auxiliary electrical generator and an access corridor to the cellar of the house.

“The deceased owners of the place had laid in enough high-quality foodstuffs to have fed a score of men for six months, the water was electrically pumped from an artesian well and the gasoline to power everything was contained in a buried five-thousand-gallon tank. But the reason I stayed there as long as I did was really the elaborate and very powerful short-wave radio. It’s because of the couple of months I used that radio that I know as much as I do about what occurred in the rest of the world, long ago, that and my abilities to speak and comprehend a large number of the languages then used.

“In the beginning, I was able to pick up and converse with a very large number of broadcasts—some of them public, commercial- or government-owned, more privately owned and operated—from them, I learned that old hatreds had flared up into new wars, invasions and rebellions nearly everywhere, with all of the deadly side effects of war—wounds, diseases, starvation, terror. I monitored the prideful, often threatening transmissions of winners and the despairing pleas of losers, I conversed with those who would receive my own transmissions. But then the Great Dyings commenced full-force and worldwide.

“Within the short space of three or four weeks, Wahrn, the numbers of transmitters shrank from thousands to hundreds to scores to dozens. They went on going off the air, a few of them doing so quite abruptly, in the very act of transmitting to me or to others. Near the end of my sojourn in that place, there were no more than a dozen other radios still transmitting and receiving in all of the world, death and« chaos and war having silenced all the rest forever.”

“Why did you leave that place?” beamed Wahrn curiously.

“Part of it was sheer loneliness,” Milo replied. “Funny, but when still large portions of the world were swarming with people in the billions, my plea-sure was to get completely away from the more built-up, more settled areas for a month or two at the time, never missing human companionship at all. But with mankind rapidly declining to the status of an endangered species all over the world, I began to pine for friendly people among whom I could live, with whom I could talk, eat, drink, share the fast-disappearing human experience.”

Mehrdok nodded, beaming, “Yes, I can understand that feeling, Milo. I was a fur trapper, far up to the north and east of here, for three years after I stopped riding as a sword for the traders. That very loneliness is the reason I packed it in and came back here.

“You said that the place was hidden in a canyon. But you had no visitors at all, in all that time?”

Milo grimaced. “No friendly ones, Wahrn. I had had to kill both of the guard dogs in order to get into the house at all—poor beasts, they were only doing the job to which they had been trained. With them dead, I had no warning of intruders until they penetrated to fairly close proximity of the house. But that house had been built with an eye toward defense of it and was more than adequately supplied with firearms, ammunition for them and even items of antipersonnel explosives.

“As you know from my memories, I had been a soldier for a large proportion of my life up until then and I was therefore well versed in techniques of warfare, as I suspected my dead host had been. I used certain of the available materials, in conjuncture with certain others I manufactured—more silent but no less deadly than explosives—to render the only two routes to my hideaway extremely hazardous to any unknowing of just what was just where. The resultant explosions or screams were my early-Warning system. With that system fully operational, very few spoilers ever got as far up the canyon as the house.

“The blasted and burned-out hulks blocking the only real road up the canyon, the charred bodies still within them, these gave firm notice that the road was mined and there were more than a few hideous, frightful surprises awaiting any who tried to come through the woods and brush on foot or on two-wheeled vehicles, too. After each attempted foray, I’d go up and clean and reset the traps, kill any wounded I happened across, then go back to the radio and the pure horror it was receiving.

“I like to feel that I served my dead host well, that I conducted the defense of his property just as he and his family would have done had they remained alive to do it. And when I finally did leave that house, I cleaned it, shut down all of the systems, locked the doors, bolted the shutters and left all of the mines and booby traps armed and ready to repel intruders.

“Into the smallest of the vehicles, I packed arms, ammunition, food, water, extra fuel, bedding and clothing, along with tools and spare parts for the vehicle and the firearms. I thought myself to be well prepared for any eventuality, but—more fool I—it’s wise that I had brought along a backpack, for long before I reached proximity to any living human beings, I struck a deep, water-filled crater in the road surface and wrecked the vehicle far beyond my abilities of any repair. Knowing of old my capacities at load-carrying, I filled the backpack with food, some items of clothing, a pair of boots, most of the gear I’d used to live off the land up in the mountains, plus ammunition and magazines and parts for the weapons I was taking with me. I lashed my sleeping bag and a rolled poncho atop the pack, filled two canteens and snapped them to my weapons belt, slung a rifle and headed northwest, in search of my own kind . . . or, rather, what I then assumed were my own kind; in the long years since, I am become less certain.

“Warily, I mostly kept out of sight of the road, moving cross-country and making wide swings to avoid approaching occupied areas by daylight, prefer-ring to reconnoiter under cover of darkness. It was well that I did so, for I witnessed just what happened to two men who simply walked innocently into small towns and subdevelopments. Those residents who had not been driven at least a little mad by the continuing deaths of all their friends and relatives had been given more than sufficient reason by the spoilers to be murderously wary and suspicious of the motives of any strangers, and their tendencies were to shoot first and ask questions later. Under the severe circumstances, no one—and I least of all—could have blamed them for an excess of caution.

“I was shot twice, from a distance, by persons I never even saw, before I decided that until things calmed down somewhat I would be a great deal safer up in the mountains, with the snakes and the bears, then I would in the stinking charnel house that Southern California was by then become. So I sought out and finally found a two-wheel vehicle which had been designed and built for rugged, off-road work, then I headed back west, into the high country, having had my fill of dying but still deadly mankind for a while.”

The trail bike took Milo fairly far up into the wild mountains before it sputtered to a stop, out of gasoline. At that point, he reshouldered pack, sleeping bag, poncho, weapons and all and began to hike farther up while there still was a bit of daylight remaining to guide him. But he had not gone far when he cut the track, a relatively fresh track, of a party of men, perhaps as many as thirty of them, all shod in Army-issue boots. Keeping to concealment, Milo paralleled the track until it was become too dark to see it easily.

Making no unavoidable noises, he made himself a cold camp, in the heavy brush where he had halted, denying himself even the small luxury of a pipe, this night. But he did force himself to sleep for a couple of hours, after making certain that his L.E.S. 9mm auto was where he could reach it quickly and easily, once more silendy thanking his dead former host for his impeccable taste in firearms.

There was no moon when he awakened, but he had expected none, what with the heavy cloud cover that had blanketed the sky for the latter half of the day just past. He made no move to check his wristwatch—that would have required a brief light which, even if it did not betray his presence and position, would destroy his ability to make his way in the darkness for some time. He stripped himself of every nonessential, along with anything that might impede his progress through heavy brush, make a noise at an inopportune time or reflect light. As weapons on this patrol, he retained only the Colt M1911A1 automatic pistol—it did not hold the eighteen 9mm rounds of the L.E.S., but he knew damned well that any man he hit with one of the fat .45 caliber rounds would go down, and that that was not only always the case with the lighter 9mm—a couple of spare magazines for it, a big Randall fighting knife and a small, double-edged Russell boot-knife. Everything else he laid beside the pack, arranged the camouflaged sleeping bag over all, then tossed brush and leaves over that. Using the edges of his bootsoles, he scuffed down to the dirt, urinated there, then smeared the resultant mud onto his forehead, cheekbone lines, chin and the bridge of his nose. That all done, he kicked the leaves back over the wet spot. He now was ready to seek out the men he had been trailing, for better or for worse.

After he had completely scouted out the “encamp-ment” he realized why he had seen no fires, smelled no smoke. Exhaustion, rather than caution, ruled among the emaciated, ill-armed men in their filthy, stained, tattered remnants of uniforms. Many of the sleepers were wearing dirty, blood-splotched bandages, all were many days unshaven and more than a few of the weapons he took from proximity to their sometime bearers were empty of even a single round of ammunition.

When all of the strangers’ weapons were safely hid-den, Milo went back to his own campsite at the trot and returned laden with all his effects. He had always had a weakness for stray dogs and abandoned cats. Seated, with his back against the thick hole of an ancient tree, he awaited the dawn, his rifle on his lap.

The first man to wake up wore the dark stripes of a master sergeant on the frayed sleeves of his camo battledress. He yawned prodigiously, stretched stiffly, took out a pair of glasses and meticulously polished them before putting them on . . . then he spotted Milo. With a strangled yelp, he reached for a rifle that was no longer where he had put it, then slapped hand to a pistol holster that proved empty. Staring at Milo, who had not raised his rifle or, indeed, moved at all, the noncom reached out and shook the shoulder of the man nearest to him, a man whose single remaining shoulder loop bore the muted embroidery of a lieutenant colonel’s silver oak leaf.

“Colonel, colonel!” he whispered, imperatively.

“Colonel Crippen, sir, we got comp’ny come to call.”

Milo willingly shared out all of his supplies of canned and freeze-dried foodstuffs, found a tiny, icy-cold spring and personally refilled the baker’s dozen of sound canteens left among the eighteen enlisted men and five officers, all that now remained of an under-strength battalion of California State Military Reserves.

Colonel Crippen was a bit under average height, but chunky, solid and powerful-looking;Milo guessed the officer’s age to be somewhere between fifty and sixty. Considering the circumstances, the quality of his onetime command and the impossible-to-effect orders with which he and his had been sent off, what had happened to him could have easily been predicted, but it still saddened Milo to hear it recounted.

By orders of the state adjutant general—who should have known better, thought Milo—Crippen and his battalion (four hundred and twelve enlisted men, three warrants and twenty-three commissioned officers, equipped with some bare score of Korean War-vintage two-and-a-half-ton trucks, a dozen three-quarter-ton trucks and about that many jeeps that were all about as venerable, a couple of old, boxy field ambulances, and a handful of much newer civilian vehicles pressed into service in the emergency conditions) were sent from the environs of Sacramento via Route 99 toward Bakersfieid, where they were supposed to join with a scratch force of National Guards-men, United States Reservists and a leavening of Regular Air Force from Edwards Air Force Base to try to restore, some semblance of order to the areas abutting Los Angeles and San Diego, both of which localities had taken one or more nuclear missile strikes.

The battalion had made it down to Bakersfieid in good order, having had only five trucks break down so thoroughly that they had had to be abandoned, stripped and left behind. With a convoy of armed men at his command and a pocketful of state-backed chits countersigned by the governor, Colonel Crippen had experienced scant difficulty in feeding his men or fueling and/or getting emergency repairs on the transport vehicles.

But at Bakersfield, there were no National Guards-men, not one Reservist and only a few Air Force men, which last group waited in Bakersfield for a couple of days, then headed back to Edwards AFB. The telephones were not working and neither, he discovered, was the radio Colonel Crippenhad been issued, nor had anyone bothered to give him spare parts for the thing. When he finally tracked down a civilian repair shop that would even look at the antique marvel, the owner laughed and remarked that he had not seen its like since his days in Vietnam, but he did allow Crippen the use of his own shortwave equipment . . . with the sole proviso that one of the colonel’s men would use the bicycle generator to recharge the storage batteries after each use.

At length, Crippen got Sacramento on the radio and finally dropped enough important names to persuade the communications-type to fetch to his set one of the adjutant general’s aides, who proved to be no help at all.

“Everyone out there seems to have trouble of one kind or another, Colonel Crippen. I have no idea where the other two units that were supposed to meet you are, but you have received your orders. Just see to it that they are carried out. I suggest, if you need resupply of vehicles and radio equipment, that you route your convoy out to the air base and see if they won’t help.”

But they would not allow Crippen or any one of his men any closer than a strongpoint hastily erected around the main gate. A hard-eyed captain sounded honestly sorry.

“Colonel, if it was up to me, I’d let you all in, but it’s not. When we first spotted you-all, I rung up my superior and he rung up his and so on and the answer came back, loud and clear; Nobody except Regular Air Force personnel and dependents goes any farther than you are now, on account of it’s some real bad diseases killing off the civilians all around here right and left, and the general, he don’t want none of whatever it is spreading to this command. Some nervous nellies are already saying that it could be some kind of bacterial warfare stuff.

“Was I you, I’d take my column back north. It don’t seem to be as bad, from what we’ve picked up on the radios, up north as it is here and points south and west of here. We can give you-all water and gas and a couple of days’ worth of field rations, but that’s all. You-all try to come through onto Edwards anyway, and . ..“ He waved a hand at the bristling fortifications behind him. “I’ll just have to follow my own orders and do my level best to kill ever mother’s son of you. Please don’t make me have to do that, colonel.”

Major Muldoon, Crippen’s executive officer, suggested attacking, forcing their way onto the military reservation, but the colonel would not even consider such a piece of stupidity, saying, “Pat, I think you’ve got shit for brains. Look, take a good hard look at what those flyboys have got there—heavy machine guns, rockets and God alone knows what else that we can’t see, probably, mortars and artillery and a whole hell of a lot more men. And what have we got to throw against them? Rifles, a few automatics and six medium machine guns, not even a single grenade, hand or rifle. There’s no earthly way we could sneak up on them, either; they’ve burned off all of the brush and bulldozed down everything that might give an attacker cover or concealment within rifle range.

“No, we’re going to accept what little they’re willing to give us, say ‘thank you, sir’ nicely and then go our way and do what we can for as long as we can with what we have to do it with. Our only other option is to disobey orders and run back to Sacramento with our tails between our legs, and I, for one, have never been good at running away from a fight.”

“Well, you’re making us run away from this one, David,” grumbled Muldoon sourly.

“This would be no fight here, this would be quick, bloody suicide, and if you can’t see that plain fact, Pat, maybe I need a clearer-headed exec. Our orders are to help the civil authorities in keeping order; they say not one damned thing about taking on the U.S. Air Force, for whatever reason,” snapped Crippen, rapidly losing patience. And when Muldoon opened his mouth to speak again, the colonel cut him off brusquely, saying, “End of discussion, Major Muldoon. I think those trucks up the road, on the base, there, are probably the gas and water and rations the captain mentioned. Captain Peele’s the S-4—have him handle the off-loading and reloading. I’m going back up there and see if I can con some ammo and grenades out of that flyboy. We may very well need them . . . soon.”

The captain went as far as the constraints of his superiors and the pressing needs of his own base would let him . . . and that was not far: five thousand-round cases of 5.56mm (just about enough to issue eleven more rounds to each man rifle-armed), eight five-hundred-round boxes of 7.62mm ammo to be divided among six machine guns, one hundred fragmentation hand grenades and twenty-five CN gas grenades, plus twenty-five hundred rounds of 9mm ball and less than half that much of .45 ACP ball. Colonel Crippen thanked the man sincerely for everything, for all that he realized that if push really should come to shove where he was going, such piddling amounts would probably only prolong the survival of his unit for bare minutes.

Beyond Four Corners, which had been incorporated into Edwards AFB, the only signs of life along Route 58 were small animals, snakes and the occasional abandoned car or truck. At Barstow, they found out what had happened to the Reservists who had been originally scheduled to meet them at Bakersfield. The men were helping civilians to man the network of entrenchments and hastily erected bunker strong-points completely surrounding most of the town.

The senior officer of the Reservists, a slender, feisty brigadier general with short-cropped snow-white hair, was curtly apologetic for his heterogeneous unit’s fail-ure to rendezvous as planned.

“The NGs met us at San Bernardino, Colonel Crippen, some of the units, both mine and theirs, having had to fight their way there through mobs trying to get their weapons. San Bernardino, when we finally got there, was a plump chicken just waiting to be plucked, most of the law-enforcement types having either been killed or seriously hurt or gone to ground in quite justifiable fear for themselves and their immediate families.

“After a conference of the combined staffs, I decided to leave the NGs down there to harden up the area, establish a perimeter and guard it. Not a few of their people had failed to show up for the muster and so they were radically understrength, and their transport and arms were but little better than are yours. I brought my own force on toward Bakersfield, although on the advice of refugees, I kept off the free-ways and made it up 15 and 247 almost without incident until we got to the outskirts of Barstow here.

“The surviving citizens had been forced into the center of town and were there fighting a losing battle against a horde of looters, lunatic refugees, assorted scum and a pack of well-armed outlaw bikers. Well, I sustained a few completely unnecessary casualties trying to do it according to the book on putting down civil disturbances—I even got nicked myself in that fracas.

“That was when one of my subcommanders took over, a Marine Corps Reserve colonel, Mac Rayford. He and his jarheads went through those buggers like shit through a goose. They killed all of the bikers and one hell of a lot of the others and they took no prisoners, wounded or otherwise, on his orders. I think it safe to say that the few who got away from him and his gyrenes are still running and will until they drop, then they’ll likely crawl.

“But the sad part of it is, no sooner was the town secured than poor old Mac dropped dead of a heart attack. However, he’d shown all the rest of us, especially me, the proper way, the only way that this business can be fought—no kidgloves, only iron fists. Extend no quarter, shoot first, if you intend to live, forget about the civil rights of your enemies and consider everyone an enemy who cannot immediately prove himself a friend.

“I am indeed sorry that I did not have you contacted to let you know that neither I nor the NGs were going to meet you, but I just never thought to radio you, not with all that was going on here in making this place defensible.”

Crippen barked a short, unhumorous laugh. “Even if you had, you couldn’t’ve raised us, general. That radio they issued us up in the capital is a piece of pure antique shit, for which they don’t even make parts anymore. But you should’ve let Sacramento know, at least.

“All that aside, sir, my orders read, in part, to subordinate myself and my command to you at our rendezvous.” He saluted and added, “I do so, now, General Brunelle. What are your orders, sir?”

After squinting at the westering sun, General James Brunelle sighed and shook his head. “Do your men have rations? Good. Have the column drive on into town. They’ll be directed to a place they can bivouac for the night, take turns showering and eat. You stay with me, colonel—we need to talk about a lot of things.”

“The upshot of it, Colonel Moray,” said ragged, dirty Crippen as he devoured with his hungry eyes the rabbit slowly browning on its green-wood spit over a bed of hardwood coals, “was that General Brunelle had more than enough men, already, to defend his perimeter. He and the people he had elected to defend were, however, running low on food and fuel; so low were they, in fact, that he already had cleared it with the commander at Twenty-nine Palms to take in his contingent of Marine Corps Reservists, proven-effective combat troops. So, you see, me and mine, we were the very last thing he needed to try and absorb.

“He did give us a few newer, better trucks and jeeps, but we had to siphon the gas for them out of the old ones; he refused to spare us a single drop of his, though he gave us all the lubricants and water we could carry. He gave us spare tires and some tools, too, but no weapons and no ammo, either, not until I agreed to trade him two of my medium machine guns and the CN grenades we’d gotten from the Air Force. Even then, all we got was a few more light automatics, 9mm submachine guns and a few very old .45 grease guns, M3 Als with a single magazine for each one.

“Before he sent us on our way the next morning, he suggested that I find myself an endangered town some-where and fortify it, then just hunker down until things got back to normal. He also advised me to stay well clear of the Los Angeles and San Diego central areas, for no one knew just what they had been hit with and they could well be virtually glowing with radioactivity.

“For all of the fact that his mechanics and driver, mine and some civilians had worked through the entire night, we were there on those automotive night-mares we had been equipped with in Sacramento, my column lost one truck after another as we drove along on 40 West. All else having failed, with only enough rations for one or maybe two more days, if we stretched it, and not enough ammo for any serious kind of a fight, nor enough gas to keep us all mounted for much longer, I’d just about decided to see if the Twenty-nine Palms Marine Base would take us all in for a while. My thinking was that they had a damned big base with a long perimeter and so might be in need of more bodies to keep it secure.

“We needn’t, it developed, have bothered. Like back at Edwards, they wanted only their own kind, Regular or Reserve, but in any case, Marines only, please. Moreover, they not only would not give us any supplies or gas or ammo, they took from us—at the points of heavy weapons!—our last four medium machine guns, the ammo for them and even the jeeps they were mounted on, saying that it was better for them to be in their hands than in the hands of whoever got around to killing us for them. They took most of our grenades, too, noting in passing that they were far too dangerous to be allowed to remain in the hands of state reserves, war-gamers or Boy Scouts. Then they escorted us back to 40 and advised us to go to hell, if we wished, but to stay away from Twenty-nine Palms.

“It was a little later that we lucked onto a gas plaza that had been neither drained dry nor torched. Not only were we able to fill all of the remaining vehicles and the jerry cans, we found that the place boasted a five-bay shop, an outdoor grease pit, an artesian well, its own electrical generator, an air compressor and a whole mess of tools, parts, fluids and what have you. Even the coffee and soft-drink machines still worked, and we found some cases of beer, juices, candy bars, smoked sausages, jerky, chips and salted nuts. So we just set up camp in and around the place and went to work on our transport . . . after we’d buried the seven bodies we found. Five men and a woman and a child, dead, without a mark on them.

“The next morning, a dozen of my men were down, violently ill, feverish, unable to hold even water on their stomachs, racked with cramps and diarrhea. Our medics tried everything they knew or had in the ambulances, but nothing worked; every one of those menwere dead before the second morning. More turned up sick even as we were getting set to bury the first lot, and included in the new cases were both of our medics, leaving us only one trained man, our battalion surgeon, Captain Weeks.

“That loudmouthed fool of an executive officer, Pat Muldoon, had to remark to me in public that the twelve men all had had a part in burying the dead folks we had found when we got there. After that, those few of us who hadn’t panicked had to wrap the bodies in trash bags and plastic sheeting and, finally, cut-up truck-top canvas before any of the others would dump them into graves. Not only that, but it was damned few of the men who would any longer help Doc Weeks tend the sick. They were dying, really, because he couldn’t save or help any of them.

“Sometime around dawn of our second morning there, two hundred and ninety-two men and officers took the best of the remaining trucks, their weapons, most of the ammo and almost all of the food and split out. Muldoon was stricken by then, and it was his shouts and pleas and screams and curses yelled after them for leaving him behind that woke the rest of us up. From the bastard’s ravings before he died, it seems that he was the prime mover in planning the mutiny and mass desertion. I hope the son of a bitch is roasting in the deepest, foulest pit of hell at this very minute!”

Then the rabbit was done and Colonel David Crippen stopped talking for a while.