Treason in the Ashes

by William W. Johnstone

  “Let’s go to Dallas,” Ben told his people. He looked at his son. “Spearhead, Buddy.”

  Dallas was a ruined city, having been bombed and burned twice by the Rebels, but still, life survived there. In a manner of speaking.

  Some Rebel doctors had opined that the constant and prolonged eating of human flesh caused the unusual smell associated with the Night People, or Creepies and Creeps as the Rebels called them. Whatever caused the stench, it was unmistakable, and it hung over the ruins of Dallas.

  “I hate these bastards,” Jersey said, standing beside Ben.

  “No more than I do,” Ben replied, his eyes watching as a human form flitted from ruin to ruin a few hundred yards away. “But that isn’t a Creep.”

  “So they’ve managed to coexist with, ah, more normal people?” Jim Peters asked.

  “Probably as procurement agents,” Ben replied.

  Cooper spat on the ground at that.

  “Back off and make camp,” Ben ordered his battalions. “Double the guards and stay alert. The Creeps hate us as much as we hate them.”

  Ben and his Rebels first encountered the Night People years back, about the same time the Libyan terrorist, Khamsin, and his army invaded North America. Khamsin and his terrorist hordes were eventually destroyed, but the Creeps clung to life and the Rebels fought them for years, only recently having decided they had finally rid the land of the cannibals. The Rebels were wrong. The Night People were back . . . or more precisely, had never gone away, just buried themselves and waited and recruited.

  And what other old enemy has returned? Ben silently questioned that evening, sitting in the darkened den of a once fine home just outside of Dallas. The Creeps can’t be the only ones. My God, are we going to have to repeat everything we’ve done?

  Ben sighed and shook his head. Probably, he concluded. At least a part of it.

  “Creeps outside the camp,” Jersey broke into his thoughts, speaking from the archway leading into the den. “Looks like they’re massing for an attack.”

  Ben stood up smoothly, Thompson in hand. “Here we go again, Jersey.

  “Let’s do it right this time,” Beth, the quiet one, said. “Let’s take first things first and hunt them down like the dangerous rabid animals they are, and destroy them once and for all. Make damn sure the job is finished. Then we tackle the warlords and punks.”

  Beth had lost a very close personal friend to the Night People, and she hated them with an intensity that bordered fanaticism.

  “All right, Beth,” Ben said. “That’s a good idea.”

  The old and very familiar chanting from the throats of the Creeps began drifting to the Rebels. “Die, die, die!” they chanted.

  Even though the Rebels had faced the Night People many times, it was still a chilling sound coming out of the darkness of dead of night.

  “Ready flares,” Ben spoke softly and Corrie spoke quietly into her head set mic.

  Ben did not have to ask if the Rebels were in place. He knew they were.

  “In sight now,” Corrie relayed the message.

  “Hold fire,” Ben said. The rancid smell of the Creeps assaulted his nostrils and he grimaced. “No doubt about who it is.”

  “Bastards,” Beth whispered the word.

  Cooper sat behind an M-60 machine-gun. For all his clowning, he was as fine a combat soldier as Ben had ever seen. Jersey was fearless in combat, a savage, merciless fighter who gave absolutely no quarter. Beth and Corrie were solid soldiers with no backup in them.

  “Flares up,” Ben ordered, and the night was suddenly bright under the artificial light.

  “Jesus!” Cooper broke the momentary silence as Ben and the others were stunned into silence.

  The ground on all sides was filled with hundreds of robed and hooded Night People, all well-armed.

  The Rebels were going to be outnumbered about five to one.

  So what else was new?

  “Fire!” Ben shouted.

  FIVE

  The Rebels laid down a withering rain of lead, the slugs ripping into flesh and slamming those Creeps leading the assault back against their friends, dead and dying. The Creeps climbed over the bodies of their dead and continued running toward the encampment, screaming out their fury at the hated Rebels.

  The second wave met the same fate as the first wave. Within seconds, the area around the Rebel camp was littered with bodies, three and four and five deep. The Night People fell back to regroup and plan a new strategy.

  “They do the same damn thing every time,” Ben said, changing clips. “Eating human flesh not only causes them to stink like rotting meat, it must also affect their minds. When this little altercation is over, I want these twin cities burned to the ground. We’ll use the captured napalm from Hoffman to bring this place down.”

  “Do all the cities this way?” Corrie asked.

  “Every one of them. We’ll take them one at a time, throw up a loose line of Rebels around them, and then destroy the ruins. And we start first thing in the morning. Corrie, bump Base Camp One and have planes readied. I want them here early.”

  “We’re going to surround Dallas/Fort Worth with three short battalions?” Beth asked.

  “As best we can. Have gun ships come in right after the planes drop their payloads, Corrie. Eyes in the sky.”

  Corrie went to work and Ben waited for Cecil’s objections. They were quick in coming.

  “General Jefferys at Base Camp One,” Corrie said, handing Ben the headset.

  “Go ahead, Cec.”

  “Are you out of your mind, Ben?” Cecil’s voice boomed in Ben’s ears. “You can’t surround Dallas/Fort Worth with three short battalions.”

  “We will be spread rather thin,” Ben admitted.

  “Rather thin!” Cecil yelled. “That’s, by God, the understatement of the decade. Three short battalions covering an area fourteen miles west to east, on both sides, and six miles deep on both ends. It can’t be done, Ben.”

  Ben smiled at Corrie. “Cec has been busy with his little ruler, hasn’t he?”

  Ben keyed the mic. “Your transmission is garbled, Cec. I’ll talk to you later. Just get those birds up.”

  “The birds are up, Ben. And you’re lying about garbled transmissions. I won’t even ask you to be careful, because I’d be wasting my breath. Base Camp One out.”

  “General Jefferys is slightly pissed, General,” Jersey ventured an opinion.

  “I would say so,” Ben said with a smile.

  * * *

  The prop-job planes arrived just after dawn and began circling while Ben and his Rebels were getting into place as quickly as humanly possible, and that took a good hour working at break-neck speed. No more attacks had come out of the night, as the Creeps melted back into the ruins of the twin cities. It had always been a mystery to Ben and the others why the Night People insisted on living in the burned-out, bombed-out ruins of cities. Over the years, those places had consistently proven to be death-traps for the Creeps.

  The planes would strike the outer limits first, along I-20, I-635, I-820, along the Northwest Parkway and I-35, creating a wall of flames, then work inward toward the ruined hearts of the twin cities.

  “Spread thin is sort of an understatement,” Ben said with a mocking smile.

  “No kidding,” Cooper said.

  Ben and his personal team were all that stood between life and death for the Creeps who might try to bust through their location at a junction along Highway 77, just south of Dallas.

  The next team was half a klick away on Hampton Road.

  “Bump the planes,” Ben said. “Tell them to go to work.”

  A runway had been hurriedly cleared southeast of the twin cities and trucks containing aviation fuel had been rolling all night to reach the siege site.

  The crumping sounds of bombs exploding on contact with the ground reached the Rebels; those closest in felt the ground tremble under their boots. Flames seared every living thing and then leaped hundreds of feet int
o the air.

  “Don’t you just love the smell of napalm in the morning?” Cooper said with a smile, knowing Jersey would have something smart-ass to say about it. “It’s so invigorating.”

  “I worry about you, Cooper,” Jersey called from the other side of the highway. “I think you’re losing it.”

  “Nothing is going to come through that,” Beth said, her voice soft in the gasoline-scented air.

  “There will be holes between the flames,” Ben said. “Just like that one right ahead of us. See it.”

  “Here they come,” Cooper yelled, over the crackle of flames eating everything in their path. He pulled back the bolt on his .50 caliber machine gun.

  Corrie, Beth, and Jersey lay behind M-60 machine guns. Ben squatted behind a Big Thumper. “Fire!” he shouted, and let the Big Thumper start banging out 40mm anti-personnel grenades.

  Within seconds it was carnage in front and slightly below their position on the overpass. The machine gun slugs ripped bodies and the 40mm grenades shredded flesh from the bone.

  The Creeps had no place to run that wasn’t lethal for them. The raging flames lay hot behind them, and the guns of Ben and his team stood in front of them. They chose the guns, and died.

  The rattle and slam of machine guns and the roar of the grenades lasted only a moment, then fell silent. The ground before Ben and his team was littered with the bodies of the dead. Ben sat down and pulled the plugs from his ears.

  “This is one hole that won’t be used again,” he said, rolling a cigarette. “One person eyes front, the others relax for a moment.”

  As the team began to settle down from the brief fire-fight, the sounds of heavy firing and the booming of mortars and rockets striking their targets faintly reached them over the crackle of the flames, all mingled with an occasional, very faint scream of burning pain.

  No Rebel could work up even the slightest amount of sympathy for the Night People—not even the religious leaders of the Rebels—Protestant, Catholic, or Jew. They all supported Ben’s plan to purge the earth of the Night People.

  The twin cities were pounded with napalm from the planes and with Willie Peter from Rebel artillery all that morning and into the afternoon. At four o’clock that day, Ben called a halt to the shelling and the bombardment. Even from where the Rebels had backed up to, they were still covered with grime and soot from the monstrous blaze that stretched for miles.

  Back-fires had been set to help contain the blaze and as wide an area cleared as best they could—behind the controlled burn—by careful burning and blasting.

  The collapsing of burned-out hulks of buildings would continue far into the night and the next day, and it would be several days before the twin cities cooled down enough for any Rebel to enter, if Ben wanted them to go in—which he did not.

  “No,” he told Buddy, lowering his binoculars and casing them. “Maybe we didn’t get them all—I’m sure they had quite an elaborate underground system—but we cut them down to a manageable level. We’ll let the combat engineers enter in a few weeks and locate and seal off any entrances and exits the bastards might still have working. We’re through. Let’s go shower and get this stench off of us.”

  The fires continued to burn out of control all that night, and they were still burning when the Rebels pulled out the next morning, giving the cities a wide skirt.

  The Rebels crossed over into what had once been the state of Oklahoma early that afternoon and pulled over to bivouac just across the line, the Red River behind them.

  They made camp in the ruins of a small town about nine miles inside the line. Their objective was about a day and a half straight north, and Ben felt sure that Jesse Boston knew they were coming.

  Buddy sat down on a stool beside his father, who was eating his dinner while sitting on the floor of the old home. “Scouts are within a few miles of Boston’s location,” he said. “They report a heavy concentration of well-armed and seemingly well-disciplined men and women.”

  “So our information was correct.”

  “It appears that way.”

  “Estimates on size of force?”

  “Hard to say. They guessed at four to five thousand, not counting kids and slaves.”

  Ben fixed his son with a hard look. “Slaves?”

  “Yes. Several hundred of them at least. And they are not treated well.”

  Ben nodded his head. Light was fading and the camp was secure. Few people, with the exception of the Creeps, would dare attack a Rebel encampment. Before making camp, the Rebels secured everything within a mile of the camp site, oftentimes ranging out two or three miles, or more. Sentries were dug in hard before dark and anything that moved was suspect. Approaching a Rebel camp at night was not only foolish, it was oftentimes lethal if one did not know the right words.

  Ben was not in a real peachy mood that early evening along the Oklahoma line. Everything the Rebels had managed to accomplish over the bloody years was unraveling. During the year-long war with Hoffman’s Nazis, the thugs and punks and slime had emerged, knowing the Rebels were tied-up fighting the goose-steppers and could do nothing to stop them.

  Buddy Raines had walked past his father and saw the storm-clouds on his father’s face and had passed the word: Leave the general alone.

  Ben drank his coffee and brooded, his thoughts mixed and often dark. One part of him said to pull back and enlarge the area of Base Camp One; take in three or four states and just let the rest of the country go to hell.

  But he knew he couldn’t do that. He couldn’t have a single oasis of freedom surrounded by anarchy. It might work for a time, but not for long. He had discussed this very matter with military leaders from those foreign countries who had sent personnel in to help fight the Nazi hordes. They were all doing what Ben and his Rebels had originally set out to do: purge the land of criminal types. Forever.

  But was that nothing more than a wonderful, impossible dream? Sometimes Ben thought so. Like right now.

  Ben was no dreamy-eyed idealist. He had seen that peace and stability and reason and order could prevail. The living, working proof was Base Camp One. Thousands and thousands of people living and working side by side and getting along like clockwork.

  So why in the hell wouldn’t it, couldn’t it, work nationwide? What was he doing wrong? Everything or nothing?

  What was he supposed to do? Kill everyone who didn’t subscribe to the Rebel philosophy?

  People had seen, witnessed firsthand, how harsh the Rebels could be; still certain types persisted in flaunting lawlessness in the face of terrible penalties . . . and those penalties more often than not meant death.

  What in the hell did he have to do to prove to people that obeying the few laws the Rebels had on the books was better than breaking them? That if one obeyed the law, their overall lives would be far better. What did he have to do to get that through their heads?

  Ben smiled for the first time that evening as he realized he was asking himself questions that humankind had been asking for thousands of years. And no one had ever come up with a workable answer or solution.

  Ben rolled a cigarette and freshened his coffee. “All right,” he muttered, only the few members of his personal team close enough to hear the words. “Maybe what we’re doing is not the best way, but it’s the most effective way I can think of. I don’t have time to hold hands with the lawless and spout fancy words about their poverty-stricken childhood and how it was society’s fault that they turned bad. To hell with that crap. It was bullshit when the country was more or less whole, and it’s still bullshit.”

  Jersey smiled and cut her eyes to Beth. Beth was smiling. The women looked at Cooper. He was smiling as he looked at Corrie. She had a grin on her face, too. Ben Raines had made up his mind and his team knew they were only a few hours away from kicking ass.

  Ben Raines could be as compassionate as any human being could be toward those he felt deserved it. To those standing under the umbrella of lawlessness, he was a dark avenging angel, cold,
ruthless, and savage.

  Ben lifted his eyes to touch the gaze of Corrie. “I want gunships up in this area by noon day after tomorrow, Corrie. I want artillery in place to shell Mister Boston’s little kingdom. Get Pat O’Shea on the horn and tell him to move his 10 Battalion out now. He’s right on the Kansas line and that should give him time to get in place north of Boston’s territory. Buddy’s battalion will flank to the west and Jim Peters’s battalion will flank east. We’ll be in position to the south. I want a show of force that will scare the shit out of Boston and his people. I will not have this nation divided. I will bring this country back together. I will, by God, do that if I have to kill every lawless son of a bitch in the land. Before I die I will see this nation put back together and working.”

  “Yes, sir!” Corrie said, and turned to her radio

  “All right!” Cooper said.

  Beth smiled and reached for her journal.

  Ben picked up his Thompson and looked at Jersey.

  She smiled. “Kick ass time!”

  SIX

  “Holy shit!” one of Jesse Boston’s lieutenants said, looking at the activity in the sky.

  Jesse’s eyes were scanning the skies, far in the distance—too far away for his limited range ground-to-air rockets—helicopter gunships hovered. Higher up, but still out of range, the old slow PUFFs lazily circled.

  A member of Jesse’s inner circle panted up. “We just received a bump from our patrols. We got artillery all around us, Jesse. Big stuff. Everything from 105s to 155s. We got tanks on all borders. Main battle tanks with 105s. And fuckin’ Rebels everywhere.”

  Jesse sighed. He had managed to convince himself and his followers that once they grew as strong as they had, Ben Raines would leave them alone. Now he knew he’d been lying to himself all along.

  “Jesse!” the shout turned him around. “Over to the radio shack. Ben Raines wants to talk to you.”

  Jesse sighed and started the walk toward the communications building.