afraid to roll her mother in, because she might land face down, and that was wrong. She stood inside the grave and heaved her mother toward her. Jill’s body came slowly down from the mountain of excavated dirt, then leapt at Helen, as if it were springing back to life, knocking her backward so that she was half buried under the corpse, pinned in the narrow grave by her mother’s rigid blue legs. Helen writhed and shoved her mother aside, slipping out from under her weight. Before she climbed out of the grave she arranged her mother’s nightgown. Then she took the shovel and tossed in the first load on her mother’s face, which she didn’t want to see anymore.
It was nearly dark when the grave was full and the dirt mounded over Jill’s body like a loaf of bread just out of the oven. As Helen stood there, Teddy came to her, carrying a bunch of snapdragons that he had cut from the front bed. They placed them on Jill’s grave.
35
All Life Is Precious
Under the assault of Kongoli, governments everywhere were dying. It wasn’t surprising when vulnerable governments fell, initially in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan, one after another, anarchy tracking the course of contagion, killing the strongest and pushing the weak aside. When Italy and Greece both collapsed on the same day, June 30, the fragility of Western society revealed itself. Civilization was like the polar ice caps, thinned out by decades of global warming, and it was melting away. France was next.
But as the Deputies Committee reconvened over secure videoconferencing, the main subject was war in the Middle East. A dogfight between a Russian Su-57 and an American F-22 Raptor over the Zagros Mountains resulted in both being shot down by highly advanced radar-guided missiles. The technology had evolved to the point that targets were hard to miss. The dogfight became a flashpoint for a larger war between the U.S. and Russia and their proxies. The Saudi oil fields were still blazing. In Iran, much of the ancient city of Isfahan was demolished. The casualties in Tehran were in the tens of thousands. Both sides had entered the war already weakened by disease, and just as in 1918, armies propagated the contagion. Hospitals, already overfilled by flu victims, were unable to treat more than a fraction of the wounded. And yet the war raged on, pulling both countries and their neighbors back into a pre-industrial world. Little was left of modernity except for weapons.
The first shock of war was, as always, how little control there was over the outcome.
“We destroyed the Iranian naval base in Bandar Abbas, but we lost four more aircraft to Russian defenses,” Joint Chiefs reported.
Defense reviewed the balance of forces in the region. “Very much in our favor, but shifting,” he said. “The Navy’s Fifth Fleet is stationed in Bahrain, and the Air Force operates in Qatar, out of the largest U.S. facility in the Middle East, with B-52 bombers at hand, ready to annihilate Iran and easily within range of Russia itself. The Russian Pacific Fleet is steaming toward the Gulf, and additional highly advanced Russian aircraft are in Iran, with more coming. Russia has the advantage of defending a far more powerful and resilient ally. The Saudi plan, as we know, has always been to let us do the fighting.”
“The environmental consequences are also extensive,” State reported. “Thousands dead of smoke inhalation in the Eastern Province. Prevailing winds are carrying toxic smoke westward. Skies are black all the way to southern Spain.”
Commerce spoke up with a heretical thought. “Is it even worth defending the kingdom?” he asked. “It will be years before either of these countries becomes important again to the world economy.”
State agreed. “Iran is one thing, but do we really want outright war with Russia?”
“They must be making the same calculation,” said Defense.
Both the U.S. and Russia were in a fever of paranoia and hatred, lusting for some kind of orgasmic finale that was somehow short of all-out nuclear war. Still, Tildy saw this as a key moment to put the Russians back in their cage. “What do we get out of waiting?” she asked. “Strike now before their fleet reaches the Arabian Sea. Run them out of the Gulf. With Putin, you don’t get many moments where you have a clear advantage.”
At the end of the meeting, a recommendation was sent to the principals: Put the B-52s in the air, destroy the Russian defenses, and block their Pacific Fleet.