Chaos in the Ashes

by William W. Johnstone

  “General Raines, may I have a word with you?”

  “Sure. Go ahead.” Ben did not notice as his team began backing up, putting some distance between the boss and themselves. Chase smiled, ducked his head, and continued working at his papers.

  “General, there is this perfectly horrid little man who suddenly appeared at the tent where I was assisting the doctors—”

  Ben stared at the woman. Oh, no. No way. It couldn’t be her.

  “—he claims to be a general in your army. The people with him are just as confusing as he is—”

  Ben sat up straight in the chair. My God, it was her! The grimy-faced, stringy-haired woman had metamorphosed from a moth to a butterfly. It was what’s -her-name. Amazing what a bath and clean clothes could do.

  “The man is horrible, General. I insist that you do something with him immediately. He is disrupting a very vital function.”

  Ben ceased his visual inspection of the lady’s physical attributes and stood up as his mind began putting together all that she had said.

  “A little man?” he questioned.

  “Yes.”

  “Claiming to be a general?’

  “Yes. He’s dressed like something out of Beau Geste. I certainly hope he isn’t a general.”

  “He isn’t. Lady, do you always have to be the bearer of bad news?”

  “I beg your pardon?” Janet questioned. She stepped closer, looking up at Ben. She really was quite pretty. And smelled good, too. Unlike a couple of hours back when she smelled like sheep dip. “Do you actually know this obnoxious person?”

  “Unfortunately, yes.”

  “My general!” The shout came from some distance away.

  “Oh, shit!” Ben muttered.

  “Watch out, boss,” Jersey called. “Here comes Emil.”

  “It looks like a band of escaped loonies with him,” Beth added.

  “What’s this?” Lamar asked, looking up from his paperwork, his half-glasses on the bridge of his nose.

  Emil Hite ran up, lost his footing as he tripped on a brick, and went sailing onto the table Chase was using for a desk. Chase went over backwards in his chair just as the folding table collapsed. Emil landed on his feet, off balance, and went lurching into Janet House-Lewiston, who fell against Ben, all three of them landing on the ground, Ben on the bottom, with Janet on top of him. All in all, it was not an unpleasant experience for Ben.

  Emil bounced to his feet. “My general!” the little con artist shouted, saluting in the French fashion, palm out. “I have arrived.”

  With Janet still on top of him, Ben said, “Yes, Emil. I can see that.”

  “Now that we are here,” Emil said. “Where would you like me and my people to go?”

  With Janet struggling to get off him, it was with great effort that Ben refrained from telling Emil the first thing that popped into his mind.

  THIRTEEN

  Jersey and Beth got Janet off of Ben, standing her up, and Cooper helped Ben to his boots. Ben stood glaring down at Emil, the hard look bouncing off the smaller man. The little con artist was very hard to insult or intimidate.

  “Did I and my followers arrive at an inopportune time, General?” Emil asked.

  Ben almost told him that anytime Emil arrived was inopportune for somebody. He bit back the thought, looking at the colorfully dressed Emil and his small band of followers. When Emil had first joined the Rebels, his following had been large, Ben recalled. Whatever else he was, Emil and his group had suffered their share of dead and wounded over the years. No one could fault them for lack of courage. “The first thing you do, Emil, is get out of those clothes and into BDUs. When that is done, you report to Dan Gray for orders. Understood?”

  “Yes, my general!” Emil saluted, turned around, and almost fell down. He recovered nicely and he and his group trotted off.

  “My God!” Janet said. “Where did you find him?”

  Ben turned and smiled at the woman. “Actually, he found me, some years back. Emil means well.”

  “Blivet,” Jersey said, before walking off a few yards. Lamar was on his hands and knees, trying to collect all his papers before the breeze sent them flying, Anna helping him. Cooper was trying to figure out how to reset the folding table.

  “Blivet?” Janet questioned.

  Ben laughed. “That’s an old military expression. It means ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag. Pretty well sums up Emil Hite. He grows on you.”

  “Like gangrene,” Lamar grumbled.

  Ben righted a camp chair and waved to it. “Sit down, Ms. House-Lewiston.”

  Janet hesitated, then sat. Lamar had retrieved his papers and gone into the big squad tent. Janet said, “I want to tell you something, General . . .”

  Ben sat down and waited.

  Janet said, “I think . . . well, it’s a fine thing you and your Rebels are doing for these people.”

  “It’s a matter of health priorities, Ms. House-Lewiston. We don’t want an epidemic on our hands.” Although that might be one way of taking care of the problem, Ben thought, and was shocked by his thinking.

  Janet looked at him for a moment. “No purely humanitarian gesture on your part at all, General?”

  “Not one tiny bit, Ms. H.L. Except for the very young and the very old.”

  Janet was silent for a moment. “What happens when you run out of vaccine?”

  “A lot of people are going to get sick and croak, Ms. H.L.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake. Will you please call me Janet?”

  “Certainly, Janet.”

  “Thank you. Will you have enough vaccine, General?”

  “Not with us. Not for all the diseases that people have to be inoculated against. But we’ll be resupplied within a couple of hours after calling for it. We aren’t that many air miles from Base Camp One.”

  “I’ve heard all about your Base Camp One.”

  “I just bet you have. And I’ll also bet that not ten percent of what you heard is true.”

  She smiled and Ben took notice of it. The smile wiped years from the woman’s face and it was a very pretty face.

  Janet visually took in what some had described to her as cruel features and cold, hard eyes. Ben’s eyes were unreadable, and his features could sometimes be hard. But not cruel. Unless he wanted them to mirror that.

  Ben continued, “The estimates of people who survived the initial attack and the plague that followed it were understated drastically. As were the number of cities destroyed,” he added sarcastically. “Thanks to a very elaborate scheme we only uncovered about a year ago.”

  Janet had no comment on that, although she knew perfectly well what Ben was talking about, having been a staunch supporter of Harriet Hooter and her liberal left party. “How many people do you think now inhabit North America?”

  “Millions. Getting an accurate count is going to be damn near impossible for awhile. But if I had to take a guess . . . I’d say about a hundred million. It seems we’re constantly having to revise that figure.”

  “A hundred million,” Janet whispered. “When the Great War came the population was approximately two hundred-sixty-five million in the United States.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And only about thirty-five percent of those of voting age chose to vote in the last nationally held election,” Beth the statistician spoke up. “That should have told Washington what the majority of Americans thought of politicians.”

  Ben smiled. If Janet wanted to match stats for stats with Beth, she was going to be in for quite a surprise. But Janet noticed the smile on Ben’s lips and very astutely picked up on its meaning.

  Corrie called, “Boss? Scouts in the city are reporting a very familiar smell.”

  Ben knew what she meant. He nodded his head in understanding and looked over at Janet. “Have you had any disappearances among your group?”

  “Why . . . as a matter of fact, yes. But among the homeless, people come and go all the time. Sometimes they return, somet
imes not. Why?”

  Ben stood up. “Get 1 Batt assembled, Corrie. It’s time to go headhunting.”

  “Right, boss.”

  Ike was on his way to Nashville, Dan to Knoxville, and Buddy was back with his special operations group.

  As usual, Ben and his 1 Batt were doing what they liked best: lone-wolfing it.

  “Headhunting?” Janet questioned, tugging at Ben’s shirt sleeve.

  “You’ve got creeps living in the rubble of the city, Janet. Night People. Cannibals. That’s why some of your group didn’t return.”

  She visibly paled at the thought. “I . . . I thought all that was just a myth.”

  “Not hardly.” Ben looked at Jersey, who had slipped on body armor and was standing close. “You ready, Little Bit?”

  She smiled. “We finally get to go to work. Kick ass time!” Janet shook her head at Jersey’s words.

  The rubble of downtown Memphis stood stark and silent before them. But to a person, the Rebels could feel eyes on them; feel the white-hot hate directed at them from the unseen eyes.

  “Watch out for those manhole covers,” Ben said. “The bastards do like to pop up out of them.” He looked over at Janet, who had insisted upon coming along with the team, despite Ben’s warnings that it wasn’t safe and it was going to be bloody and brutal. “Excuse me. Person-hole covers.”

  Janet sighed.

  “I like killing creepies,” Anna said.

  Janet cut her eyes to the teenager. “Child, these people can’t help themselves. I’m sure they all came from single-parent homes and many were abused as children. They were also deprived of the childhood toys that others around them had in abundance. They probably were unable to receive adequate hot lunches in school and that affected their ability to learn. This is their way of striking back at what they perceive as an uncaring society.”

  Anna stared at the woman. Unwrapped a piece of gum and stuck it in her mouth, chewing for a moment. “Horseshit!” she said, then walked off a few yards.

  Ben smiled at the brief exchange.

  “That is a very impudent child,” Janet said.

  “You and Anna should talk later on,” Ben told her. “She could tell you something about a lousy childhood. And something about a fierce drive to better herself without being on the public dole. She’s a damn good soldier, too.” Ben turned and walked into the ground floor of what used to be one of Memphis’s largest department stores. His team followed him.

  Janet hurried to keep up. She was unarmed, since she didn’t believe in the individual owning or carrying of guns, or the use of them against human beings or animals.

  “That woman is a ding-a-ling,” Anna whispered to Ben.

  “She’s politically liberal,” Ben returned the whisper.

  “Ding-a-ling,” Anna insisted.

  Ben smiled and walked deeper into the darkness of the ground floor of the multi-storied old building.

  A very faint odor reached his nostrils as he passed a door that led to a downstairs storage area. Ben paused, sniffed around the edges of the closed door, then stepped back, pointing at the door. Cooper and Beth took grenades from their battle harness and stood ready as Ben put his hand on the doorknob.

  “Whatever in the world are you going to do?” Janet asked.

  “Make boom-boom,” Anna told her.

  “There may be innocent people down there!”

  “If they are, they’re being prepared for serving as appetizers,” Jersey told her. “Now get the hell out of the way.”

  “Pull the pins,” Ben said, then jerked open the door.

  The fire-frag grenades were tossed into the darkness. Ben slammed the door closed and jumped behind cover, jerking Janet to the floor behind a counter with him.

  The door blew off its hinges and brought with it the agonizing cries of men and women whose flesh had just been shredded and peppered with shrapnel. Cooper used his Squad Automatic Weapon to spray the shrieking and stinking darkness below. The howling stopped and only the smell remained.

  In the rubble of what was once downtown Memphis, a battleground suddenly erupted as creeps opened fire on the Rebels.

  Cooper bi-podded his SAW and bellied down, an extra can of ammunition beside him, as the others took up tight defensive positions in the old department store.

  “That was horribly brutal,” Janet said to Ben.

  “Write your Congressman,” Ben told her. “Excuse me—Congress-person.”

  “All units now coming under attack,” Corrie reported. “Rebels at the MASH stations holding.”

  “Let us rock and roll,” Ben said with a smile.

  Janet looked at him and shook her head.

  The ground floor of the littered and rubbled old department store turned into a battle zone as robed creeps literally began coming out of the woodwork, pouring onto the floor in stinking screaming bunches.

  Ben and his team, working out of a defensive circle, laid down a blistering wall of fire that stopped the charging creeps hot and dying in their own blood.

  Janet lay on the dirty and littered floor, both hands over her ears.

  Ben and Beth began cossing grenades while Corrie, Cooper, Jersey, and Anna poured on the fire-power from weapons set on full automatic.

  The attack broke off as suddenly as it began.

  “Out, out, out!” Ben yelled. “Corrie, advise all units to fall back. Get out of the downtown district.”

  When all units were clear, Ben said, “Now call in air strikes. HE and napalm. Blow it up and burn it down.”

  “You don’t mean that!” Janet said.

  “Watch me,” Ben replied.

  In their stinking lairs, in basements and other underground caverns all over the city, the Night People waited, knowing full well what was coming at them next. They knew Ben Raines’s tactics as well as he knew theirs.

  The Rebels backed off, threw a thin and gappy defensive circle around the city, with the Mississippi as one stop-gap, and let the P-51E’s and the attack helicopters have a field day.

  When the planes and choppers would finish a run, Ben would order his tanks and SP and towed artillery to hammer the city. The air bombardment went on all day and the ground artillery all night, until what had been left of Memphis was in total ruins or on fire.

  Ben then stationed snipers all over the city to shoot down any creep who might crawl out from under the ruins. If a hole leading underground was found, the Rebels dropped satchel charges down it or blew up any wall or half-building close by, forever sealing the tunnel.

  “There were street gangs of young people in that city,” Janet said, putting accusing green eyes on Ben.

  “Not anymore,” Ben told her.

  When the Rebels pulled into Memphis, much of the city was rubble. This time when they pulled out of Memphis, they left behind them a downtown that was in smoking ruins. They left the airport runways and the tower intact. Ben armed several hundred of the survivors he’d found on the outskirts and they immediately began cleaning up and clearing out a subdivision and small mall just south of the city.

  “Forget the city,” Ben told the group. “We’ve got to go back to the land if we’re ever going to pull this nation out of the ashes of ruin. You’ll be in constant communication with Base Camp One and resupplied as you need it. Good luck.”

  Much to Ben’s surprise, Janet House-Lewiston elected to go with the Rebels.

  “It’s the safest I’ve felt in a long time,” she told him. “And you may take that as a compliment if you wish.”

  But before the Rebels pulled out, Ben had received some sobering and sad news from Cecil.

  “Mexico and Central America just blew wide open, Ben. South America is in chaos. Civil war is raging in every country south of our borders. It’ll take Europe years to get back on its feet, and God only knows how it will end south of us. Here in the SUSA, I have issued emergency currency and declared the old dollar worthless. Every one of our residents who held those old dollars was reimbursed. But that will sto
p the outlaws from using the money they stole here. We’re not quite back to where we started from. I can see some light at the end of the tunnel. And Ben, I recalled our troops from Europe. We need them here in case of another attack. The Europeans said they could take it from this point and wished us good luck and thanks.”

  “Fine with me, Cec. It’ll be good to have them home. As for the luck, we’re going to need all we can get.”

  “There is more, Ben. Those three American reporters you got along with so well in Europe are back. They left here yesterday by resupply convoy. Should be catching up with you in a couple of days.”

  “Cassie Phillips, Nils Wilson, and Frank Service?”

  “That’s them.”

  “That’s fine with me, but who are they reporting for?”

  “Our newspapers down here,” Cecil said with a laugh.

  “Sounds good. Any word on Simon Border’s boy, Bobby Day?”

  “He’s back with Simon. He’s working on Simon’s newspaper, The Voice Of Reason.”

  “Shit! Voice of reason, my aching ass.”

  Cecil laughed.

  “You have any more good news you want to share, Cec?”

  “I believe that’s enough for one day, buddy. Ol’ Black Joe out.”

  “Ol’ Black Joe?” Janet questioned, standing close to Ben.

  “It’s Cecil’s idea of a joke. He finds it amusing.”

  “It’s macabre.”

  Ben shrugged that away. He had found that if Janet even had a sense of humor, she kept it well-hidden. Ben had discovered years back that most left-wing liberals were the most humorless people on the face of the earth . . . at least to his way of thinking.

  The long Rebel column took Highway 51 out of Memphis, heading toward Kentucky, traveling slowly, carefully checking each town and village along the way. The gangs that had invaded the SUSA had seemingly dropped off the face of the earth. Ray Brown, Carrie Walker, Tommy Monroe, and Dave Holton would not hesitate to attack lightly armed civilians, but they wanted nothing to do with Ben Raines. They, and every member of their gangs, knew that Ben would kill them with no more emotion than if he’d squashed a roach. Scouts had been unable to find a trace of the gangs.