The War After Armageddon

Harris knew the arguments, beginning with: They’d do it to us if they had the chance. But the problem always unraveled when you got down to who “they” were. Would that woman whose face bore a constellation of black moles pull the trigger? The adolescent girl with the hopeful eyes? The dreamy joker with his nose in his book?

These weren’t the people who pulled any major triggers. Or precious few minor ones. It was the people like Montfort… or Harris himself… or Gui or al-Mahdi… who gave the orders to the flunkies who pressed the fatal button.

Harris had no moral qualms about killing his country’s enemies. He still believed that Washington’s impossibly legalistic treatment of terrorists back when had played into the hands not only of the terrorists themselves but also of men like Gui and Montfort. In the real world, far from the cloistered study, some men and even women were your mortal enemies, and you had to kill them first.

But you couldn’t just “kill them all and let God sort them out.” Because you weren’t God. And no God worth believing in would want you to do it.

Sometimes, in one of his funks, Harris pictured God as a slumped, disappointed old man, propping up His gray head with one hand, eyes downcast.

Anthropomorphism. Harris understood the silliness of it. God was unimaginable to any human being. But what if that lay at the heart of the problem? The need men felt to imagine a comprehensible God, to measure Him. But God was unimaginable and immeasurable. So they did what men did: They cut the problem down to size and painted a stern old man on the church’s ceiling.

Standing in the shabby heart of Nazareth, Harris wondered if Jesus — when he was the age of that young girl waiting in line — had foreseen what would take place on this day in His boyhood home. Had He seen anything beyond the cross but Heaven? Was every man and woman in that fetid line lulled by his or her own vision of paradise? Of a Heaven above the clouds, or a happy marriage, or an answer to all of life’s questions hidden in a book?

Harris could have wept. At his helplessness in the face of all before him. But he didn’t weep. Instead, he pivoted on his right heel and set off after Pat Cavanaugh. To be with his own kind.

He was going to stay in Nazareth. That was a given. He wondered if it might be useful to talk to the crowd, to get up on a vehicle and say something, anything.

He couldn’t very well reassure them.

Tell them to flee? To get out of Dodge? That was the best practical advice he could offer. Even though they had nowhere to go.

He longed for the con ve niences of his youth, the easy communications, even the scrutiny of the media. Where were the cameras now? His nation’s enemies, when they shot down every satellite they could and corrupted the rest, had only assured that their deaths would go unrecorded. They had robbed his kind of the ability to talk freely across oceans but had failed to understand the resilience and ingenuity the West applied to warfare when it sensed its back was against the wall.

When the people of Nazareth died, their epitaph would be written by their killers.

How would Sim have it done? By death squads? Einsatzkommandos, the way the Nazis did it? Another blood-orgy like Jerusalem? Or just order out the remaining American troops and start shelling and bombing? Then send in the cleanup crews to root out the woman with the moles from her hiding place in the cellar?

Harris felt a childish impulse to step up to the nearest figure in line and tell him or her, “You are not my enemy.” But he knew it would only bewilder the already frightened.

As Harris approached the head of the line, he saw that only the bottom layer of the pallet remained. And the sweat-drenched soldiers on distribution duty were breaking into that. Behind them, Pat Cavanaugh stood erect in his body armor. As if attempting to inspire a confidence he didn’t feel himself.

Yet, as Harris edged up to him, the younger man grinned. “Pardon me for saying so, sir,” he told the general, “but this is one assignment I’m not going to thank you for.”

The attempt at banter fell flat. Cavanaugh’s smile was one of despair.

“We just have to focus on the immediate problem,” Harris told him. “Do what’s doable. Right now, we need to do everything we can to prevent any further outbreaks of violence, anything that certain senior officers might be able to describe as ‘an armed rebellion’.”

Cavanaugh nodded. He was about to say something when his battalion command sergeant major marched up.

“Sir?” he said to Cavanaugh. “Division wants you. On the land line.”

Cavanaugh glanced at Harris. The general nodded: Go see what they have to say.

The sergeant major didn’t leave with his commander. Tired and mentally sluggish, Harris had to eye the man’s uniform to remind himself of his name.

“Fun, travel, and adventure. Right, Sergeant Major Bratty?”

“All I can stand, sir.” He looked at the general, sizing him up, man to man. Then he added, “Don’t this suck shit, though?”