"Norman Spinrad - Journals of the Plague Years 1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Spinrad Norman)

wonder that the authors of these ,journals seem, from our happier perspective,
driven creatures, and quite insane.
That each of them found somewhere the courage to carry on that through
their tormented and imperfect instrumentalities the long night was finally to
see our dawn, that is the wonder, that is the triumph of the human spirit, the
spirit that unites the era of the Plague Years with our own.
--Mustapha Kelly
Luna City, 2143
JOHN DAVID
 I was gunfoddering in Baja when the marks began to appear again. The
first time I saw the marks, they gave me six years if I could afford it, ten if
I joined up and got myself the best.
Well what was a poor boy to do? Take my black card, let them stick me in
a Quarantine Zone, and take my chances? Go underground and try to dodge the Sex
Police until the Plague got me? Hell no, this poor boy did what about two
million other poor boys did--he signed up for life in the American Foreign
Legion, aka the Army of the Living Dead, while he was still in good enough shape
to be accepted.
Now you hear a lot of bad stuff about the Legion. The wages suck. The
food ain't much. We're a bunch of bloodthirsty killers too bugfuck to be
allowed back in the United States fighting an endless imperialistic war against
the whole Third World, and our combat life expectancy is about three years.
Junkies. Dopers. Drooling sex maniacs. The scum of the universe.
For sure, all that is true. But unless you're a millionaire or
supercrook, the Legion is the best deal you can do when they paint your blue
card black and tell you you've Got It.
The deal is you get the latest that medical science has to offer and you
get it free. The deal is you can do anything you want to the gorks as long as
you don't screw up combat orders. The deal is that the Army of the Living Dead
is coed and omnisexual and every last one of us has already Got It. We've all
got our black cards already, we're under sentence of death, so we might as well
enjoy one another on the way out. The deal is that the Legion is all the
willing meat-sex you can handle, and plenty that you can't, you better believe
it!
Like the recruiting slogan says, "A Short Life but a Happy One." We were
the last free red-blooded American boys and girls. "Join the Army and Fuck the
World," says the graffiti they scrawl on the walls about us.
Well that too, and so what?
Take the Baja campaign. The last census showed that the black card
population of California was entitled to enlarged Quarantine Zones. Catalina
and San Francisco were bursting at the seams and the state legislature couldn't
agree on a convenient piece of territory. So it got booted up to the Federal
Quarantine Agency.
Old Walter T., he looks at the map, and he sees you could maintain a
Quarantine line across the top of the Baja Peninsula with maybe two thousand SP
troops. Real convenient. Annex the mother to California and solve the problem.
So in we go, and down the length of Baja we cakewalk. No sweat. Two
weeks of saturation air strikes to soften up the Mexes, a heavy armored division
and two wings of gunships at the point, followed by fifteen thousand of us
zombies to nail things down.