Out of the Ashes

by William W. Johnstone

  His face was still swollen and he was feverish, able to see out of just one eye, but he felt a little bit better. He knew he’d been very, very lucky, for he had counted as many of the wasp stings as he could see or feel, and reckoned he had been stung more than thirty times—maybe as many as fifty. As allergic as he was to stings, that many should have killed him.

  He stumbled back to bed and pulled the covers over his head.

  He opened his eyes and knew, on this day, finally, that he was going to be all right.

  Well, Ben thought, I probably should have died. I’m a lucky man. Lord, have I been sick.

  He rolled over in bed and stared at the red numbers on his digital clock radio. The numbers stared back. Almost, he thought, with a mixture of mute arrogance and accusation. The numbers seemed to be saying: Get up! Get up! You’re not sick. You feel fine. So get up and get to work.

  He pushed back the covers and slowly swung his feet to the carpet. He was just a little light-headed and shaky, but his forehead felt cool to the touch and the swelling was gone from his face and hands. He could see out of both eyes. And he was hungry—ravenous. Ben smiled. He doubted a dying man would get out of bed to get something to eat.

  The numbers on the clock read five thirty-three. He wondered what day it was. He picked up his watch from the nightstand and looked at the day and date.

  He couldn’t believe it. “Damn!” he said softly. “I’ve been sick for ten days!”

  It didn’t seem possible.

  Ben felt there was some significance to this date, but he couldn’t place the importance of it.

  Well, he thought, it’ll come to me, I suppose.

  He walked slowly into the kitchen, put some water on to boil, then went to the bathroom for a long, hot shower, the steaming water helping to revive him. He shaved, dressed, then had a cup of coffee while he fixed breakfast: scrambled eggs and bacon. He ate that, then fixed a bowl of hot cereal. Finally, after two more eggs on toast, his hunger was appeased.

  He looked out the kitchen window and again thought how lucky he’d been to come through alive. The day was bright and beautiful. He thought back, pushing his memory through the feverish haze of the past ten days. He remembered drinking lots of water, for the fever was dehydrating. He recalled eating several bowls of soup, some crackers, and drinking some milk. One time, he recalled, he’d fixed a bowl of cereal. That, he thought, was all the nourishment he’d had in ten days.

  He shook his head. Well, that was all behind him. He would, by God, get several more of those cans of wasp spray, the kind that shot a stream for about twenty feet, and clear out the little bastards from around his house. But for now, it was time to get to work.

  Monday through Saturday, Ben usually rose at five-thirty. On Sundays he tried to sleep late. But unless he had been up late, which was unusual for him, his eyes almost always popped open at five-thirty, with or without the clock radio.

  Ben made himself a second cup of coffee, fixed a glass of ice water, then went into his small office and took the cover off his typewriter.

  Sunday was another workday for him. Another day to face the typewriter and hope the muses were flowing. He belonged to no church—no organized religion. He had attended church as a child, and as a young man, but early in his adult life a discontent with religion had grown in him. Mass hypocrisy turned him off.

  Ben had a slight headache, so he took two aspirins and then wound a fresh piece of paper into the typewriter. Yeah, he remembered, he was to start a new book. He always, despite the number of books he had published, under a variety of names, viewed this moment with some anticipation and just a bit of fear. The beginnings of a new novel. Would it work? Would it jell?

  Who the hell knew?

  His agent said he liked everything Ben did, but agents are supposed to say things like that. What else? “Ben, you’re a lousy writer. Why don’t you give it up and become a plumber?”

  Probably make just as much money. Ben smiled.

  He glanced at his just-completed novel, all wrapped up for mailing. Do that in the morning, Ben thought. His books usually brought him a $3,500-$4,000 advance, a few thousand in royalties, maybe some overseas sales in the future . . . and that was that. Once in a blue moon, maybe a movie deal. Gravy.

  He was a paperback writer; had long since given up writing for the hardcovers. He knocked out a book every four to six weeks. He would tackle anything from action books to love stories; had a pretty good men’s adventure series going for him, and was building a good reputation among the publishing companies as a steady, producing kind of writer—nothing fantastic, nothing earthshaking. The type of writer whose books sold in grocery stores, variety stores, drug stores, and other paperback outlets. Ben would never win the Nobel for fiction, for Ben did not write to change the world’s evil(?) ways. He wrote to entertain.

  The world, Ben once told his agent, is someone else’s bailiwick, not mine. Just like law enforcement, people get what they want, whether they’ll admit it, or not. Same with government. Me? He laughed at his agent’s expression. I’m just a country boy trying to make a living.

  That memory amused him. He leaned back in his chair and smiled.

  Country boy. Yeah, he nodded his head in agreement, I’m a country boy. Maybe with a better than average degree of urbanity about me than most country boys, but nonetheless, still . . . just a country boy. He liked black-eyed peas and beans and corn bread and fried okra and salt-meat sandwiches. But he also liked the good wines and fine cuisine found in the fancy restaurants of the world.

  And he knew he was a snob when it came to music, having sampled it all and found it lacking . . . except for classical.

  But he loved the South—especially Louisiana, with its rich heritage and diversity of people. There wasn’t much in the way of culture where Ben lived. As a matter of fact, he often told his eastern friends, there really wasn’t any culture where he lived: no little theater, no concerts, no ballet. Ben had once mentioned Zubin Mehta to a friend and the man had thought he was talking about a new brand of chewing tobacco.

  But Ben liked the people in the Delta—for the most part. He had friends here, good friends. There were some real shit-heads on both sides of the color line, but there had never been any real trouble in this part of the state.

  And damned little mixing, he reminded himself.

  You stay on your side of town, and I’ll stay on mine. I don’t like you much, and I know you don’t like me, but the government says we have to get along, so let’s just make the best of it.

  So far, so good.

  Like that black city-council member once said, “It’s better here than in a lot of places. ‘Least we haven’t started killin’ one another—yet.”

  Wise disclaimer on his part, Ben thought.

  Ben believed it was probably coming to the race-war point—someday. Probably soon. And he wasn’t alone in that view.

  Never married, Ben had experienced several intense love affairs that had ultimately soured, leaving him with a jaundiced eye toward everlasting love. He really didn’t trust women; and his being a hopeless romantic didn’t help matters. His books almost never had happy endings (something his agent used to bitch about). But the N.Y.C. man finally accepted that as part of Ben’s style, and assumed that Ben was not going to change.

  He pulled his attention back to the typewriter and the blank paper staring at him. But nothing flowed. He turned off the typewriter, then turned it back on, listened to it hum.

  Mother’s milk causes writer’s block, he recalled reading one time. Or the lack of it.

  I damned sure was sick from those wasp stings.

  “Come on, Ben!” he scolded himself. “Get with it.” He sighed, typed a few words, tore the paper from the machine, and wound in a fresh sheet.

  That scene was repeated several times that morning, until finally Ben hit his stride, as he knew he would. He did not work from an outline, never knew where the manuscript was going, and let his characters develop themsel
ves.

  Ben settled down to write.

  All the muses seemed to be working and the words were flowing well; no strain. He wrote for three hours, was satisfied with the start of his novel, and then, with a coffee taste in his mouth and a slight headache (he assumed that was from chain-smoking a pack of cigarettes), he shut it down for the morning.

  Every Sunday morning Ben drove into town at about eleven o’clock to visit a friend of his who ran a service station. Every Sunday morning. Routine—almost never varied. Ben would visit for an hour, pick up the Sunday papers (three of them), and drive back home, where he would read himself to sleep, then work for several more hours in the afternoon.

  Ben slipped his feet into cowboy boots, put on a long-sleeved shirt, for the day was unusually cool, and once more glanced at the calendar. The meaning of the date finally hit him.

  “Well, I’ll be damned!” He smiled. “It’s my birthday. I’m forty-four years old.” He laughed, happy to be feeling good after his bout with the wasps. “Happy birthday, Ben Raines—many, many more, partner.”

  Then he wondered why his parents hadn’t called. They always called early.

  He glanced around his empty, silent house, the joy of the moment becoming sullied just a bit because he had no one with whom to share his one day of celebration.

  He shrugged it off and locked up the house.

  The term “country boy” once more entered his mind as he walked across the yard to his pickup. He hummed an old country song as he walked, one of the few country songs he liked: “A Country Boy Will Survive.”

  Ben thought that ironic, since he was beginning a novel of disaster—Armageddon. The end of the world.

  Getting into his pickup, he remembered both his mother and father kidding him about his return to trucks; his father saying, “Boy, you started out in trucks when you was just fourteen. Held that damned old rattletrap together with spit, prayer, and baling wire. Hell, son—you remember. It didn’t have any doors! You had the first seat belts in Illinois. You had to tie yourself in with rope to keep from falling out going around curves. Now that you’re goin’ to be a big-time writer, damned if you haven’t gone back to trucks. You’re just a farm boy at heart, Ben. Can’t ever take the country out of the boy, eh, Ben?”

  And his dad would laugh in that big hearty way of his. Good, solid country people.

  Ben missed his parents, knew he would have to take some time off and visit them—soon. They were both getting up there in years. Both in good health ... but, one never knew when the hands of time would grow too heavy and lose their grip.

  Ben didn’t like to think about that.

  As he drove, Ben looked at the countryside, and at the houses he passed. Something seemed . . . well, odd about them. They looked . . . deserted, if that was the right choice of words. He shook his head. “My imagination,” he said.

  Ben wasn’t a rich man—far from it. But he made enough from his efforts to live in comfort. His home was paid for, he had nice furniture, deep, rich carpet, and all the other accouterments that made life a bit more than merely an existence.

  Ben Raines also drank himself into a quiet stupor every night of the week. Including Sundays.

  But he was one of those rare people who never suffered a hangover. He could not remember ever having one. And he hedged whenever he would question himself about why he drank so much. He never would admit his was a lonely life.

  Writers drink, he would say.

  Bullshit, his mind would reply.

  It was never a very stimulating or productive self-conversation.

  Sunday morning radio programing in most parts of the rural South is, at best, dismal—alternating (depending upon the stations one chose) between hillbillies yodeling praise to the Lord, black gospel groups shouting and stomping praise to the Lord, and nasal preachers hem-hawing and gulping praise to, or from, the Lord. Some of them speaking in tongues.

  Ben never turned on his radio on Sunday mornings. And TV was just as bad. It was one of his great gripes that public broadcasting, in radio form, did not get into the area in which he lived.

  Ben lived out in the country, literally. About ten miles outside of Morriston, a small town located at the bottom of the Delta of Louisiana. The town had a population of eight thousand: fifty percent black, fifty percent white. No industry. Lots of bars, black and white; never the twain shall meet. Music in the bars was soul or country. That was it. So, Pavarotti, do not waste your time coming to the Delta, unless you first appear on “Barbed-Wire Hoedown,” yodeling; or on “Boogie Funky Wagon,” beating on a drum and shaking your tushie.

  It was gracious Southern living at its best and worst. Half-million-dollar homes and two-hundred-dollar shacks. Cadillacs and food stamps. Cotton, rice, soybeans, and wheat.

  And football.

  Ben cut his eyes to the ditch by the side of the road and his thoughts were abruptly returned to the present. He jammed on the brakes, sliding to a halt.

  That was a body in the ditch.

  He got out of his truck and, stepping over the water (when had it rained?), walked to the ditch and knelt by the man. The man had been dead at least a week; his corpse was blackened and stinking.

  He walked back to his truck and flipped on the CB radio. “Give me a Montgomery Parish Deputy or a state trooper.”

  Nothing.

  He repeated his call and received the same scratchy emptiness from the speaker.

  His CB was a good one and he had had it on ... a couple of days before the wasps hit him.

  “Break-one-nine for a radio check,” he said.

  Nothing.

  He monitored all channels and received the same on all of them. Nothing.

  He sat in his truck for a moment, reviewing what he could remember of the past week, before he was stung. He had been shopping, was it Wednesday or Thursday? Had he listened to a radio or TV since. No, not since the night he had gotten drunk listening to the TV newspeople flap their gums about nuclear war.

  Ben looked around him, at the clear day, sunny and bright. Obviously, no nuclear war had occurred. He suddenly felt uneasy. Or, had it? When had he heard those horns honking so frantically? He shook his head. Kids, probably, cutting up.

  He glanced at the body in the ditch and then at his watch. Almost noon. “Well, this is silly!” he said. “There is something wrong with my radio, that’s all.”

  Then he thought about the radio in his truck. He turned it on, tuning in to the local station first. Nothing.

  He punched all the preset buttons. Nothing. He spun the dial left to right, then went slowly back.

  Nothing.

  A finger of something very close to fear touched him. He shook it off. But something deep within him, some ... sense of warning prompted him to punch open the glove compartment and take out the .38 special he always carried. Ben had blatantly ignored the government order to turn in all handguns, as, he suspected, had several million others. Ben despised Sen. Hilton Logan and everything he stood for. Logan was a dove—Ben was a hawk. Logan was a liberal—Ben was a conservative. A conservative in most of his thinking.

  He checked the cylinder of the .38. All full. He shoved the pistol behind his belt and put the truck in gear. He had not recognized the dead man.

  A mile further and he turned onto the road that was just inside the city limits. A half-mile further, on the edge of town, in an open field, Ben slowed to watch several large birds, vultures, rise from the ground at the sound of his truck. They flapped ponderously away. Full and heavy. Ben had only to glance quickly to see what they had been feeding upon: bodies.

  This time it was fear that touched him—open, naked fear. “Did the balloon go up?” he asked aloud. “If so, why was I spared?”

  He could not answer his question.

  He drove on until he could drive no further. Two cars were blocking the street. Ben did not have to get out of his truck to see that the occupants’ bodies were blackened and decomposing in death.

  He backed up, tu
rned around, and drove down a side street until he came to a residential area. He saw no signs of human life, but neither did he see any bodies. He wound his way to the service station and pulled into the drive. There, Ben sat in numb silence, staring at the windows of the Exxon station. The windows were smashed, broken; glass littered the drive. The body of his friend lay sprawled half in, half out of the door.

  Ben got out of his truck slowly, not really believing all this was happening—had happened. He corrected his thinking. He knelt down beside the man. Mr. Harnack was stiff and black and stinking. Dogs had gnawed on him.

  Ben stepped over the body and walked to the phone. He punched out the numbers of the police department, letting the phone ring twenty times. No answer. He called the sheriffs department. Same results.

  Ben felt the butt of the .38, and the touch of the wood was reassuring.

  He stood in the doorway and listened intently. He could not hear one human sound coming from the town.

  He walked to the desk and turned on the small TV. He got the same results from every channel. And this was cable, coming from Chicago and Atlanta. Nothing from Chicago. Blank screen. The others had the civil defense emblem on the screen, but nothing to explain why.

  Bold Strike. The words returned to him. Hunt a hole, partner. “I’m dreaming,” Ben said, his voice sounding strange amid the silence and the death. “What the hell happened? It has to be a dream.”

  But he knew he was not dreaming.

  He thought, this is nation wide—world-wide. Those thoughts chilled him, bringing beads of sweat to his forehead. “Jesus, am I the last man on earth?”

  Then the words of that grizzled sergeant drifted back to Ben as he stood in the doorway, looking out at the mute gas pumps. “Survive is the name of this game, men. Fuck a bunch of candy-assed civilians. When the balloon goes up—and it will go up, believe that—most civilians won’t make it, ‘cause they don’t know their ass from peanut butter about stayin’ alive. And what is so sickenin’ is, they don’t wanna know. They’re content. They’ve got their pretty little houses, two cars in the garage, membership in the country club, and they think being tough means playing football. As far as they’re concerned, everything is aces up. But they don’t know the meaning of tough. They’ll be the victims in any holocaust. But I’m gonna teach you men what tough is—mentally and physically. And when I’m through with you, you’ll survive. If you men make it through the first wave, if you don’t take one nose-on, most of you will survive.”