Trapped in the Ashes

by William W. Johnstone

  Ben halted the column and got out to inspect what was left of a small town just a few miles east of Hagerstown. Carrion birds had feasted on the naked bodies that lay outside the homes—after flesh had been cut from the bodies. The brass of shell casings lay twinkling on the ground.

  “They put up a fight,” Jersey observed. “They weren’t taken easy.”

  All the bodies had been carved on, with great hunks of flesh cut away.

  And Ben noticed something else, too: those children of the Night People that West and the others had brought with them, in hopes of salvaging, were staring intently at the mutilated bodies, a savage gleam in their cold, murderous eyes.

  “I see it,” West spoke the words softly.

  “Watch them very carefully, West,” Ben cautioned. “I have a strong suspicion they’ll revert back faster than you can blink.”

  The mercenary nodded, his face grim.

  Ben ordered the bodies placed in a house and the house burned.

  They could find no bodies of creepies. But all knew that with the recent victory of the Rebels, the crawlers had probably discarded their robes for a traditional form of dress. And the creepies, if they did not carry off their dead, would probably have no compunction about carving up or eating their own.

  Ben waved the column on and linked up with Tina on the outskirts of Waynesboro.

  “Hell of a fight here, Dad. You saw what went down at that little town just east of here?”

  “Right. We burned the bodies. Jerre, order tanks into the town, everything buttoned down.”

  The tanks rumbled and clanked past and disappeared into the silent town. Silent, but with the smell of death hanging unseen over it.

  With the column halted, West had positioned some of his men around the vehicles containing the children of the creepies.

  Tina watched the move and met her dad’s eyes.

  “The little bastards were licking their chops back in that town. West has realized that he made a terrible mistake in bringing them, but neither he nor I know what to do to rectify it—not at this stage of the game.” He sighed. “Well, we know what to do, we just don’t want to do it.”

  Tina cut her eyes to the teenagers. They stared back at her, the hatred cutting like sharp invisible knives in the sunny afternoon. “It’s coming down to no prisoners at all, isn’t it, Dad?”

  “No. I won’t permit that. I’m not going to kill children. If we find them, we take them alive and then leave them.”

  “So we can fight them again another day.” It was not a question; more a statement of fact.

  “I guess so, girl.”

  The roaring of cannon fire from the tanks tore the afternoon. The rattle of machine guns immediately followed.

  “Back to work,” Ben said, a grim note in the statement.

  It was grim, but it was short, as the Rebels smashed the small stronghold of Night People.

  During the mopping-up, a small pocket of prisoners was found in a basement. Naked, abused, and very nearly out of their minds from fear and the ravages of day after long day of degradation at the hands of their captors.

  “See if you can get some of these old vehicles running,” Ben told his people. “We can’t leave these people here. We’re going to have to open up a runway at Cumberland and call for more birds from the base. Dan, start getting statements from the survivors. We’ve got to know what we’re up against in the next town.”

  “How goddamn many of these creatures are we facing?” Dan asked, using rare profanity.

  “Several hundred thousand, if we can believe what those crud back in Philly told us.”

  “Are you thinking that this force out west is aligned with the creepies?”

  “I don’t know. But it wouldn’t surprise me. I think we’re going to be—we are—facing the greatest threat we’ve ever encountered. And we’d damn well better win it.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Ben led the convoy over to the Interstate, using a badly rutted country road, and halted them at Greencastle. That town, unlike the others, showed no signs of any battle. No shell casings, no blood, no bodies.

  “This place was abandoned years ago,” West said. “The survivors probably decided that living beside any well-traveled road, like this Interstate, meant trouble and grouped out in the country. Probably in those towns we just left.”

  “That’s my thinking,” Ben agreed. “We’ll clear Hagerstown in the morning. I want us on full alert this night. The creepies know we’re hot on their butts, and they probably also know Voleta and Monte and Ashley are somewhere behind us. They may try to form another alliance.”

  “You really think those thugs are following us?” Emil asked. Emil was slowly recovering from his one-sided affair of the heart with Michelle.

  “Oh, yes, Emil. And on both sides and ahead of us, probably. They’re wanting to get us in a box for an ambush. That’s why I keep taking a snake’s route getting home.”

  Thermopolis arched an eyebrow. He had wondered why the column was traveling like a bunch of wandering nomads.

  “The creepies just might decide to clear out tonight rather than face us in the morning,” West said.

  “Personally, I hope they do,” Ben told him.

  Ben had his people up and fed and ready to roll while Dan sent his Scouts into the city well before dawn. It had turned colder during the night; winter was preparing to show them all it still held a punch.

  “Tina reporting that the town definitely has creepies,” Jerre told him. “No signs of other life.”

  “Order Tina and her teams out. Tell artillery to stand by. They will commence firing on my orders,” Ben said. “HE and incendiary. Damned if I’ll lose people when I can prevent it.”

  Less than a minute passed before Tina reported that her teams were clear and in position to act as forward observers.

  “Commence firing.”

  The artillery rounds began singing their songs as they roared through the cold dark morning. In five minutes, portions of Hagerstown had been turned into a raging inferno, the flames caused by the incendiary rounds licking upward into the darkness. An old underground gasoline storage tank went up with a whooshing roar, balls of flame jumping high into the air like angry fingers of hate, searching to destroy.

  The gunners began lobbing shells in with much more discrimination, setting one section of the town blazing, then moving to another. After an hour of pounding, Ben ordered the gunners to cease firing.

  Dawn was just beginning to pierce the darkness with thin silver fingers, lifting up and pushing away the lid of night.

  “If Monte and the others are within fifty miles of this area,” Cecil said, “they’ll sure know where we are.”

  “That they will. Jerre, order Tina and her teams back. Let’s get ready to pull out.”

  The Night People finally figured out that Ben and his Rebels were moving westward, and nothing was going to stand in their way. The leaders ordered their kind to abandon any towns that stood in the way, moving either north or south until the Rebels had passed.

  The Rebel columns bypassed the burning city and picked up Interstate 70, heading west, leaving the smoke and death behind them. Full dawn found them looking at the deserted little town of Hancock, Maryland.

  “Less than two thousand people lived here before the Great War,” Jersey said, looking at an old map.

  “I had friends here,” Jerre said. “Just up the road is a little town called Piney Grove. My suitemate at college was from there. I was so sick I couldn’t even move off the floor of the room. I lay there watching her die. The thing that got me moving was when the rats came and started eating on the dead in the dorm. How come it didn’t kill the damned rats? I crawled outside, found a car that was unlocked and passed out in the front seat. All around me people were dead or dying. Absolutely, totally gross. When I finally was able to see and sit up, and my eyes stopped seeing double, I found that the damn car didn’t have any keys in it. The cars that did have keys also had dead bodies in
them. I finally found a car that was empty and had the keys in it.”

  “Where was college?” Cooper asked.

  “Salisbury State. Took me days to get home. I had to drive all the way up into Pennsylvania because Washington had taken a direct hit. I met people who had been on the fringe areas. They didn’t have any eyes! They had looked at the blast and their eyes had melted. The flesh was burned off of others. I had never seen anything like that. I didn’t know what to do to help them. Then it dawned on me that there wasn’t anything I could do; nothing anybody could do. They were just walking around dying.”

  “You sure you want to do this, Jerre?” Ben asked, his voice soft, for he was remembering finding his own parents in Illinois, just after the bombing.

  “Yeah,” she said, her voice just as soft. “I need to do it.”

  Ben waved the column forward.

  “Creepies have been here,” Tina’s voice came through the speaker. “But they’ve bugged out. It’s pretty grim here, Dad.”

  “Hold what you’ve got. We’re not far behind.”

  Jerre’s eyes were busy as they approached the small city. But whatever thoughts and emotions she was experiencing, she kept bottled up . . . at least for the time being.

  Ben halted the column just inside the city limits and walked back to Thermopolis’s van. “Seems like I’m always asking you to do some unenviable job. So I’m asking again. This is where Jerre grew up. Would you people stay with her while she tours the area?”

  “Don’t you think she would rather have you with her, Ben?”

  Ben blinked; looked shocked. “No. I don’t.”

  Thermopolis cut his eyes at Rosebud, and both of them smiled rather sadly. “All right, Ben Raines. We’ll look after her.”

  Ben and Dan took Tina and a team of Scouts and went on a quick tour of the town. It was just as Tina had reported: grim.

  Mutilated bodies had been stacked in houses to rot and gather flies—after the choicest cuts had been carved from them. That the men and women had been carved upon while still very much alive was evident by the hideous expression on the still twisted and pain-filled faces, mouths still open in a silent scream, before death mercifully took them across that dark shore.

  “Did you find any survivors?” Ben asked Tina.

  “None, Dad. And no sign of any.”

  “The creepies took their meals with them,” Ben said. “Twenty-first-century version of fast food.”

  They all looked at him to see if he was kidding. He wasn’t.

  “Large hordes of thugs and outlaws and warlords out west, Monte and Ashley and Sister Voleta operating here to the east, night crawlers all over the bloody place. We have long years of war ahead of us, General,” Dan said.

  “Probably more years than you and I have, Dan. Our children’s children will be fighting to pull this land out of the ashes of barbarism and ignorance and savagery. It’s up to us to see that they don’t have quite as hard a battle.”

  Ben lifted a map and studied it for a moment. “We’ll let Jerre get her fill of her old hometown—and it probably won’t take her long; then when the birds land and get the rescued out, we’ll cut south. I’ve got a hunch the creepies didn’t go far. We’ll check out this little town on the West Virginia line. It’s just far enough off the beaten path for the crud to feel safe. If so, we’ll see if we can’t crash their party.”

  Jerre stood before a plaque that read:

  GOD HAVE MERCY ON THOSE WHO DIED IN THE GREAT WAR. TWENTY-ONE THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED FIFTEEN SOULS. CUMBERLAND, MARYLAND.

  “It was this way all over the nation, Jerre,” Thermopolis told her. “The survivors scooped out great holes in the earth and buried them in mass graves. It would have been impossible any other way.”

  “I know. Well,” she sighed, “I’ve seen it. Hell, I don’t even know if my parents are buried here. They were pretty badly decomposed when I finally got back to the house.”

  “I thought that a neighbor was going to bury them?”

  “He was too busy trying to get my pants off. No. They were still in the back yard when I popped that jerk with a poker and split.” She shook her head. “I’ve seen enough. Let’s go help clear the airport. The birds are on the way in.”

  “West, you take your men and cut south off the Interstate on this county road, Thirty-six. It’s about ten or twelve miles west of our present position. Hold up when you get to this little town of Barton. We’ll be coming down Two-twenty and we’ll stop at McCoole. I want both our forces to hit Westernport together. I think the creepies have prisoners with them, so shelling is out until we learn different. You go ahead. We’ll pull out thirty minutes behind you.”

  West nodded and left.

  Ben glanced at Jerre. “How are you feeling?”

  “I’m all right. In a way, I’m glad my parents died back then, rather than like . . . the creepie way.”

  “Let’s start getting mounted up, people.” He glanced up at the sky. He would like to travel through West Virginia, but he didn’t want to get caught in the mountains in a snowstorm. The weather had turned decidedly cooler, but the skies remained clear. After Westernport had been cleared, if the weather still looked good, they would angle over and pick up the Interstate, take that south down to Charleston. After that . . . ? Play it by ear.

  And where in the hell had Monte and the rest of that crud gone? Ben didn’t think they had given up—although that could certainly be possible. They might well have reassessed the situation, found it not to their liking, and then pulled back to gather up more men. It seemed like for every decent person left in what had been America, there were ten times ten more crud. He shook his head. Time would tell.

  He walked the line of vehicles, deep in thought and killing time until West was well on his way. He wasn’t even sure what month it was. February, he thought. They had spent so many weeks in the city that all of them had lost track of time.

  He looked up the line. The column seemed to stretch for miles. The trucks and tanks and APCs and jeeps and Hummers containing the only army in the world—that Ben was aware of—fighting to restore some type of democracy to the nation.

  So much to do. And where in the hell did that large force out west pop up from? Had the nation been invaded by some foreign force? It was certainly possible. Khamsin had done it.

  The Libyan had waltzed right in and caused a lot of grief before he elected to stick his nose in with the creepies in New York City.

  Another force knocked down and out. But how many more to go? And would it ever stop?

  “Miles to go,” Ben muttered. “Miles to go.”

  NINETEEN

  Jerre was very quiet as they rolled out, as could have been expected after experiencing one hell of an emotional jolt. Ben noticed that she looked back several times with tears in her eyes.

  What could he say? He knew only too well the sense of loss when you have nobody left, all family dead. Kith but no kin.

  “Recent fire right over there, General,” Cooper broke into his thoughts, pointing to what was left of a house. The ashes were still smoldering.

  “The creepies are just one jump ahead of us, that’s for sure.”

  A mile farther down the road they saw another home that had been torched. Fat carrion birds were strutting around in the yard, too heavy to fly after gorging themselves on dead human flesh.

  “Yuck!” Beth said, her eyes lingering on the bloated birds.

  “All part of the plan, Beth,” Ben said.

  “You believe in God, General?” she asked.

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Heaven and Hell?”

  “Sure. But I also believe—rightly or wrongly—that there are levels, with the highest plane being very sparsely populated.”

  “And what level will you attain?”

  Ben laughed. “I don’t think I’ll get very high, Beth. I’ll probably be with the rest of the warriors. And I’m not at all certain that Valhalla is going to be a paradise. My punishment will probabl
y be having to listen to Emil sing throughout eternity.”

  After the laughter, Jerre said, “Emil appears to be bouncing back rather quickly after his loss.”

  “Life goes on, Jerre. Emil is a sharp little guy and he’ll be all right.” But, he added silently, I can tell you for an iron-clad fact that he’ll never forget the woman.

  “So you believe that love fades after a time?” she asked.

  “Sure. I don’t know that true love ever really dies. It just loses its sharpness, dimming into a memory that one can live with.”

  After that brief exchange, the miles passed quickly and in silence. Ben was surprised that Jerre even brought up the subject of love; but then, she had always been full of surprises.

  “Coming up to the junction, General.” Cooper’s words jogged him back to the present.

  Ben pulled the mike from its clip. “Eagle to West.”

  “Go, Eagle.”

  “In position?”

  “Setting on ready.”

  “We’re turning west on One-thirty-five. Five miles to touchdown.”

  “I’m rolling.”

  “Eagle to Scout.”

  “In position, Dad. The town is populated, but it’s iffy as to who or what lives here. Those that we have seen don’t look like creepies.”

  “Ten-four, Scout. We’ll be with you shortly. Hold what you have. Tank commanders, take your beasts to the point. Convoy slow, let them pass. Dan, block the road leading south out of the town. West, split your people and block the west end of One-thirty-five.”

  “Welcoming committee coming out,” Tina reported. “They’re dressed in normal clothing, but they’re all armed.”

  The tanks were in position as Ben pulled up. He stepped out of the Blazer and walked up to the knot of men and women. The first thing that caught his attention was the paleness of skin. Even though, he cautioned himself, that could be attributed to staying indoors during a very long and cold winter.

  But he didn’t believe that for a second.

  “Welcome, General Raines!” a man called, a smile on his lips.