Out of the Ashes

by William W. Johnstone

  “Tell the cunt to get out of the truck!” a voice yelled at him. “Give us the woman and you can carry your ass on outta here.”

  The voice came from above, the second story of the building opposite the truck. Don’t get yourself sandbagged in here, Ben thought. There’s probably more than one of them.

  He slipped from behind his pickup and eased his way along the overturned garbage truck. The words of his combat-wise instructor came to him: “Don’t ever look over an object—look around it, from either end, carefully.”

  Ben slowly pushed his head forward until he could see through the gap between end-loader and truck bed. He saw them, two of them, looking out of windows from the second floor of the building. White men wearing ornate cowboy hats, with feathers and ornaments. Urban cowboys. About sixty yards maximum, Ben calculated.

  Slowly, with no sudden movement, Ben pushed the muzzle of the SMG between the space and sighted them in. Bracing himself for the slam and rise of the muzzle, knowing the weapon would climb from left to right, Ben started from the left window, low, and pulled the trigger, holding it back, fighting the jump of the powerful weapon.

  Thirty rounds of .45-caliber ammunition chipped stone from the building and smashed windows, the sound echoing through the concrete canyon. One man was flung out the window. He bounced on the sidewalk and lay still. Ben could hear the other man moaning and crying. He tried to call out; his words were mushy, not comprehensible. Ben knew then he had hit him in the face and jaw.

  “Start the truck,” Ben called to Fran. “Pull it up here. You’re going to have to drive. I’ll ride shotgun until we get back to the highway.”

  “That man’s hurt, Ben,” she said.

  “Fuck him! He opened this dance, not me.” He slipped around the truck and got in. “Let’s go. Head for the interstate., north. When you get to that shopping center on the right, pull off on the frontage road and stop at the first phone booth.”

  “You want to call somebody?”

  “No. I want to find the nearest armory. Preferably an infantry unit.”

  “It’s a little late to enlist, isn’t it?” She surprised him with humor.

  Gutsy girl, he thought. “No. I want to prowl through their supplies.”

  “Why?”

  “Drive, Fran. Just drive.”

  At the armory, Ben was relieved to find that while the unit had been called out, a lot of their equipment was still in place. A lot of men had either been too sick to report, or had said to hell with it and not reported in. Probably a combination of both, Ben thought.

  Ben plugged the small bullet hole at the top of the windshield and then began prowling the armory. He found the weapons room, but the steel vault was locked, and impressive-looking. He told Fran to keep an eye open for people, then went in search of a sledge hammer. He went to work on the outside wall of the concrete block building. When he had hammered a respectable hole in the blocks, Ben pulled a deuce-and-a-half truck up to the wall, hooked a steel cable to the blocks, and pulled the wall apart. He hammered at the steel inner wall until he had worked a hole in it, then hooked a double cable to it and pulled the vault open enough to slip inside.

  “You sure you weren’t a safe-cracker before becoming a writer?” Fran asked. When he did not reply, she asked, “What in the world are you looking for, Ben?”

  “Hah!” Ben yelled. “Found it!” He had discovered the M-16s, but Ben—like many vets—disliked the weapon with an emotion bordering on hatred. He would have loved to have found an old BAR, but those were getting rare. He handed Fran a box, then another box. He stacked several more boxes outside, then climbed out to join her.

  “Ben—what is this junk?”

  “Grenade launcher, 40-mm high-explosive cartridges, and three boxes of hand grenades, mixed. White phosphorous, HE, and smoke.”

  “Thank you,” she said dryly. “I don’t ever remember being so impressed with a reply. What in the crap are you going to do with this ... shit!”

  “Survive. I wish they had some Claymores in there.”

  She sighed. “Ben, I don’t even want to know what that is.”

  “It’s a mine. Hell! They don’t even have any det cord. What kind of an outfit was this?”

  “I never knew you were like this, Ben. I thought writers were sensitive people.” She looked at him. “Well ... with you, I should have known.”

  He tapped the case containing the grenade launcher. “I wish I could find a fact sheet on this thing. Fran? Go rummage through the files and see if you can locate a fact sheet on the M203 grenade launcher.”

  “Ben, you’re impossible!”

  He took her by the shoulders and rudely shook her. It startled her. When he spoke, his words were hard and his voice was rough. “Fran? Let me tell you the way it is, baby.” She gazed up at him, taking in the seriousness in his eyes. “Now, you heard that redneck call you a cunt back there, didn’t you?”

  She nodded.

  “Women, Fran, of any kind or color, young or old, are going to be at a premium, I think. And a good-looking woman is going to be a real prize, worth killing for and more. And you are a good-looking woman. You’ve got the disposition of a pit viper and you’re stubborn as a mule, but you’re a beautiful woman. Now, listen to me. There is no law and order. None! You can’t call a cop, now, Fran. What has happened is a total, complete, one hundred percent breakdown of law and order and civilization and rules and ethics and decency. We’re back to the jungles and the caves, honey. Dog eat dog and the strongest man wins the woman. That’s the way it’s going to be for a while. Believe it. You’re not a stupid woman, Fran, so I don’t have to tell you what a gang-bang is, do I?”

  She shook her head.

  “You ever been pronged up the ass, Fran?”

  “Certainly not!”

  “Yeah? Well, don’t give up hope, baby, ’cause lots of guys like it that way—good and tight. And without me, and all the firepower I can muster, you’re fair game. And you’ve got a pretty ass, Fran.”

  “That’s disgusting, Ben Raines. You’re ... you’re just telling me all this to scare me; make me dependent on you so you’ll have someone to sleep with, that’s all. Isn’t it, Ben?”

  “Honey,” Ben said patiently, “if, or when, I find a community or a gathering of decent, civilized people, I’ll dump you on them faster than I’d turn loose a polecat. Because I’ve got things to do, places to go, and events to record. I hope we’ll find that in Memphis—I thought perhaps Jackson. I believe there are people here, good people, but they’re hiding, afraid, and they have good reason to be. So if not here, then Memphis. If not there, some other place where you’ll be safe, and I will find you a safe place. But until then, we’re stuck with each other, and I don’t know why, but I feel an obligation to take care of you. So you do what I tell you to do, Fran—when I tell you to do it—and I’ll keep you alive. But for now, you carry your butt into that office and find me that fact sheet.”

  She stared at him for a long half-minute, both of them silent. Her expression a mixture of fear and respect for the man standing in front of her. “All right,” she said. “You’re quite a man, Ben Raines.”

  “I’m a survivor.”

  “I’m ... I’m glad it was you who found me.”

  He nodded his head slowly. He felt that was as close as he would get to hearing a thank you or a compliment from her lips.

  “I’ll get you that sheet,” she said.

  They spent the first night on the road in a home just off the interstate, a few miles south of Winona, Mississippi. The home was pleasant, well cared for, and devoid of bodies. Fran picked a few late-blooming flowers to decorate the dinner table while Ben made dinner.

  “I wonder what happened to the people?” she asked.

  “Probably, no one will ever know. Maybe they were visiting friends when ... it happened. Maybe they panicked and ran away.”

  She watched Ben, watched him as she had never watched anyone before in her life. He was never without a g
un, and his walk had become that of a stalking great cat. His face and eyes had changed, becoming hard and cold. And she thought she would not like this man for an enemy, for he was unlike the other men she had known in her life. She wondered about his military life, for she had known many men who had served, but none like this one. Ben Raines was ... a predator type. And she admitted—to herself—she was a bit afraid of him. She also knew she was lucky it had been Ben that found her.

  At night, he ordered the lights out. “The two-legged animals will be on the prowl,” he told her. “Safer this way.” He had then pulled down the garage door and locked it.

  “When we get close to Memphis tomorrow,” he said, as she lay in his arms, the sweat of love-making cooling and drying on them, “we’ll start monitoring the CB much more closely. All channels. We’ll find us a place to hole up and keep our eyes and ears open—we’ll see who comes to us. Maybe you’ll get lucky and some decent people will have banded together.”

  “You really want to be rid of me, don’t you, Ben?”

  “No,” he replied honestly, and his answer surprised him. “Well,” he added, “yes. In a way.”

  “That is a confusing reply, darling.”

  “You’re a survivor, Fran—but not the same type as I am. But”—he chuckled—“I have grown quite fond of you. In a way.”

  “Yes,” she said, a wry quality to her voice. “We have gotten close, haven’t we? Go ahead, Ben. Drop the other shoe.”

  “I want to see this nation, honey—as much as I can. From the Atlantic to the Pacific, from border to border. I want to see what was destroyed, and how. I am going to chronicle this happening, this event, and it’s going to take me a couple of years to do that—maybe more. I’m going to find a good tape recorder and about a million miles of tape and talk to people. Then I’m going to find a beat-up old portable typewriter, put the tapes in some form of order, and hole up in the mountains or by the sea for a couple of years, work ten hours a day, every day of the week, and write it, just the way it happened.”

  “Ben? Who, may I ask, is going to be around to read the damned old thing?”

  He laughed and cupped a warm round breast, rubbing the nipple against his palm. She stirred against him, her hand seeking and finding his maleness, fingers encircling it, feeling it start the process of thickening. She masturbated him slowly as her breathing became shallow, then a hot pant.

  “We will have a civilization again, Fran,” he said, slipping his hand down the softness of her belly, to touch the dampness of pubic hair. His fingers found her and parted her, working in and out, his thumb on her erect clit. “A civilization ... someday. And people will want to know exactly what happened. And they will read my work.”

  Ben knew she was not a student of history or even much of a reader when she asked, “But you’ll be long dead by then, baby—so, who cares? So what?”

  He kissed her and parted her lovely legs, slipping between them, positioning himself. He knew he was going to miss her after they parted.

  “Ben?” she said, grasping his penis and inserting the head inside her.

  “Yes, Fran?”

  “Fuck me, Ben!”

  Just outside of Memphis, south of the airport, Ben found a house that was free of bodies and was set back from the street, amid a large number of trees. He and Fran settled in. Once they saw a car drive slowly past, and another time a pickup truck, but he made no attempt to hail them, for they were full of hard-looking men, heavily armed, and they did not look like church-going types.

  When the wind was right, the stench from the city was horrible.

  By monitoring the CB, Ben learned there were people alive in Memphis, several thousand by the way one group talked, and it was that one group that interested Ben.

  It appeared they were occupying about a ten-square-block area and clearing about a block a day, also sending out scouts to search for survivors. Their conversation on the CBs was intelligent, and they, of all the groups Ben monitored, did not use profanity. The base station used channel twenty-five and the call sign of Genesis. Ben decided to take a chance.

  On the morning of their third day in Memphis, Ben used the CB in his truck to call them. “Break-two-five for Genesis,” he called.

  “This is Genesis. Who are you?”

  “I’m friendly,” Ben said. “But I have definitely seen some unfriendly types.”

  Genesis chuckled. “Yes, we do seem to have a few of those still roaming the city.”

  “I’m from Louisiana and I have a woman with me. I need to leave her in a safe place. I ... may not be back.”

  “We’re Christians, friend. She’ll be safe with us. You don’t seem to be too far away, but getting to us may prove dangerous. We’re cleaning out the criminal element and the looters daily, but they still far outnumber us. We’re just better armed and have some military people with us. Also U.S. Senator Hilton Logan is here. This is sort of a command post, you might say.”

  “Logan,” Ben muttered, the mike off. “Of all the people to spare, you have to spare that bastard.”

  “That’s sacrilege, Ben,” Fran said.

  “No, that’s just common sense, Fran.” He picked up the mike. “I’m driving a dark blue pickup truck. I’ll be there shortly.”

  “We’ll intercept and cover for you. Good luck.”

  Ben turned to Fran. “I think they’re good people, Fran. Despite the fact that they took in Hilton Logan. You’ll be safe. If I don’t think you will be, I won’t leave you with them.”

  She smiled. “Hilton Logan was going to be the next President,” she said. “He’s been a bachelor all his life. Maybe it’s time to change all that.”

  Ben laughed at her and knew then that Fran was a survivor.

  “Aren’t you terribly nervous with all these big bad guns all over the place?” Ben needled Logan. “How many times have you pissed your pants since you’ve been here, just thinking about all these pistols?”

  The men stood alone. Fran had immediately been taken in by the women.

  “I gather, Mr. Raines, you don’t approve of my gun-control bill.”

  “I believe my first words when I’d learned it had passed were ‘that goddamned do-gooder motherfucker.’ I was, of course, referring to you, Logan.”

  The senator flushed. “How did an attractive, lovely woman like Mrs. Piper come to find herself in the company of one such as you?”

  “Just lucky, I guess.” Ben smiled at him. “Been swimming lately, Senator?”

  The blood rushed to Logan’s face.

  Logan had been swimming off the coast of Florida when he had suddenly begun screaming that he was under attack by sharks, and one had just bitten him on the leg. When he had recovered from his swoon and had been pulled ashore, it was discovered he had some old fishing line wrapped around his ankle and thigh. Hilton Logan was not famous for his grace under pressure.

  “You are despicable, Raines!” He spat the words.

  “And you’re a coward.” Ben walked away, deliberately turning his back to the man.

  That was the beginning of the hate between the two men. It would intensify in the years ahead.

  Ben left an hour after dropping Fran off. The people begged him to stay, warning him of the horrors they had heard about, telling him of the dangers. But Ben was firm in his commitment.

  “I’m a writer,” he told a U.S. Army colonel. “Maybe not a very good one, but I wonder how many of us survived the ... holocaust. What if I’m the only one left? And please don’t think me pretentious for saying that. Someone has to travel this nation, record all that’s happened, and I’m going to do it.”

  The colonel shook his hand. “Eight cities went under with nukes. Detroit, Washington, New York, Miami, Omaha, Houston, all the western part of Missouri, Baltimore, and San Francisco. That’s the report I have so far. I suspect there are many more. The east coast from New Jersey all the way up to the Maine border is gone, so I’m told. The rest of the cities took germ-type warheads.”

>   Ben told him of the tape-recorded message and where to find it on the band. The colonel shook his head. “I’ll just be goddamned. I knew about the double double cross. Looks like now we have a triple cross.” He told Ben all he knew about the events leading up to the war, then clasped him on the shoulder. “Luck to you, Mr. Raines.”

  “It’s you who needs the luck, Colonel,” Ben said. “If you’re planning on staying around that bastard Logan.”

  “I heard that. Talk is the military—what’s left of us—is going to install him as acting president.”

  “Good God!”

  “My words exactly when I heard it. Look, Mr. Raines...” The colonel’s words were spoken low so only Ben could hear. “What are you going to do with your Rebels?”

  “My what?” Ben was taken aback.

  “Your Rebels, sir. General Travee told General MacPeters that Col. Bull Dean called his Rebel commanders just at the last minute and put you in charge of them. ‘Bout five thousand of them. Said he told Travee ‘that ought to sober up the drunken son of a bitch.’ Begging your pardon, sir.”

  “It’s news to me, Colonel.”

  “Well, it’s true, sir. The Rebels probably came out of this better than anybody—they knew what was coming down; had preset places to hide, with food and water and bottled air and protective gear.”

  “Where are they, now?”

  The colonel shrugged. “I have no idea, sir.”

  Fran came to him and kissed him lightly and in a very ladylike way on the cheek, while Hilton Logan stood back and scowled at Ben. Being the best-looking woman in the area—that Ben had seen—the two were drawn like a magnet. The senator being somewhat of a ladies’ man.

  If, Ben thought, the ladies had a taste for shit.

  “Ah do thank y’all so much, Mr. Raines.” She gushed sorghum molasses all over him, for Logan’s benefit.

  Ben smiled. “Ah, too, have enjoyed yore company, ma’am.” He returned a measure of ribbon cane syrup. “You have been like a light in the wilderness to me.”