Fire in the Ashes

by William W. Johnstone

  Reluctantly, he drove up to the old home and got out of his pickup.

  He stood for a time, looking around him, all the memories rushing back, clouding his mind and filling his eyes. He took in the land he had helped his father farm. Fighting back tears, he climbed the steps and opened the front door.

  His parents were sitting on the couch, an open Bible on the coffee table in front of them. Ben's dad had his arm around his wife of so many years, comforting her even in death.

  They had been dead for some time. It was not a pleasant sight for Ben.

  Ben walked through the house, touching a picture of the family taken years before, when life had been simpler. Suddenly, he whirled away from the scene and walked from the house, leaving his parents as he had found them. He carefully locked the front door and stood for a time, looking through the window at his parents. Through the dusty window, it appeared that his mother and father were sitting on the couch, discussing some point in the Bible.

  Ben preferred that scene.

  He walked from the porch, got into his truck, and drove away. He did not look back.

  * * * *

  “And there is no point in looking back now,” he muttered. “None at all."

  Rosita glanced at him, but said nothing. It had not taken her long to recognize Ben's moods. And he definitely was in one of them now.

  “We must not forget the past,” Ben said aloud. “We must never do that. But we must learn from it. Now, we must look ahead—as far ahead as any of us dare. We must be visionaries; we have got to rebuild."

  “Out of the ashes?” Rosita said.

  “Again,” Ben said, briefly cutting his eyes toward her. “But this time it's going to be rough."

  She said nothing.

  “You don't think it will happen, do you, short-stuff?"

  “If anyone can do it, you can, Ben.” She sidestepped the question.

  “Nice safe answer."

  “It's the only answer you're going to get out of me,” she replied.

  And Ben knew the petite Spanish-Irish lady could close up tighter than a clam when she wanted to. And she obviously wanted to. And did.

  * * * *

  “Crossing into Iowa,” the scout vehicle radioed back to the main column. “Disregard that,” he said. “The bridge is blocked. Jammed solid with vehicles."

  “You heard, General?” the pickup in front of Ben radioed back.

  “I heard.” They were on Highway 116, a few miles west of Roseville. “You scouts cut south to Keokuk; check out the bridge there. We'll pull the convoy over here and sit it out until you radio back."

  “Ten-four, General."

  With their legs encased in heavy hip-length fisherman's waders, volunteers sprayed the highway with pesticide and then fired the area around the highway, carefully controlling the burn around the tanker trucks. The drivers of the tankers were not too thrilled about the burning. But they figured they'd rather take their chances at that than be bitten by a flea and put in quarantine.

  Ben got out and walked up and down the cold, windswept highway. Very little snow, he observed, and was curious about that. He wondered just how much the bombings of twelve years back had affected the weather? He concluded it must have disturbed the weather patterns to some degree. And he wondered how wise it was to plan any future in a cold climate with bitter winters such as the ones in Tri-States?

  “A thought, Cec,” he said. “I'm thinking we probably need to shift into an area where we can double crop without too much trouble."

  “Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama?” Cecil asked.

  “And maybe the southern part of Arkansas, too. We'll hash it out with the people when we get to Tri-States. I think we'll have to stay there several months, at least. Let the plague run its course."

  “The people will go wherever you tell them to go, Ben,” Cecil said quietly.

  “I'm not anyone's king, Cec. And have no intention of becoming so. We'll vote on it."

  The radio in Cecil's truck barked. “The bridge at Fort Madison is plugged up tight, General. We're taking a secondary road down to Hamilton. Thirty-forty minutes at the most."

  “Ten-four,” Cecil acknowledged the message. “Standing by."

  Forty-five minutes stretched into a hour. The sky grew leaden and began spitting snow. Ben tried to reach the scouts. No reply. He waited for a half hour, then turned to Cecil.

  “I'm taking a patrol,” Ben said. “I'll call in every fifteen minutes. Anything happens, you're it."

  “Ben..."

  “No. It's my show. Maybe the radio conked out. Could be a lot of things. I'll be in touch."

  Back in his pickup Ben looked at Rosita. “Out,” he told her.

  She stuck out her chin and refused to leave.

  “Do I have to toss you out bodily?"

  “That's going to look funny,” she calmly replied.

  Ben closed the door and put the truck in gear. He would lead the small patrol. “Your ass,” he told her.

  She smiled and said something in Spanish that sounded suspiciously vulgar. He hid his smile and pulled away from the main column.

  “Check your watch,” he told Rosita.

  “Ten forty-five."

  “Call in every fifteen minutes. It'll take us about forty-five minutes to an hour on these roads to get to Fort Madison. That was their last transmission point. Whatever happened happened between there and Hamilton. You've got the maps. What highway do we take?"

  “Take 96 out of Niota."

  At Nauvoo they found the pickup truck parked in the middle of the highway. One door had been ripped off its hinges and flung to one side of the road.

  “What the hell ...?” Ben muttered.

  Rosita's face was pale under her olive complexion. She said nothing.

  Ben parked a safe distance behind the pickup and, Thompson in hand, on full auto, he walked up to the truck. Thick blood lay in puddles in the highway.

  “Jesus Christ!” one of his men muttered, looking into a ditch. “General!"

  Ben walked to the man's side. The torn and mangled body of the driver lay sprawled in a ditch. One arm had been ripped from its socket. The belly had been torn open, entrails scattered about.

  “Over here!” a Rebel called, pointing at an open field.

  The second scout lay in a broken heap, on his stomach. He was headless. Puddles of blood spread all about him.

  “Where's his head?” a man asked.

  “I don't know,” Ben answered. “But we'd damn sure better keep ours. Heads up and alert. Combat positions. Weapons on full auto. Back to the trucks in twos. Center of the road and eyes searching. Move it."

  Back in the warm cab of the truck, Ben noticed Rosita looked very pale. He touched her hand. “Take it easy, little one,” he said. “We'll make it."

  He called in to Cecil. “Cec? Backtrack to Roseville and take 67 down to Macomb. Turn west on 136. We'll meet you between Carthage and Hamilton. Don't stop for anything. Stay alert for trouble."

  “What kind of trouble, Ben?"

  Ben hesitated for a few seconds. “Cec—I don't know."

  “Ten-four."

  Ben honked his horn and pulled out, the other trucks following.

  They saw nothing out of the ordinary as they drove down 96. But Hamilton looked as though it had been sacked by Tartars then followed up by hordes of Tasmanian devils.

  “What the hell ...?” Ben said, his eyes taking in the ruins of the town. Bits and scraps of clothing blew in the cold winds; torn pages of books and magazines flapped in the breeze. Not one glass storefront remained intact. They all looked as if they had been deliberately smashed by mobs of angry children.

  There was no sense to any of it.

  Ben said as much.

  “Perhaps,” Rosita ventured, “those that did it do not possess sense as we know it?"

  “What are you trying to say, Rosita?"

  “I ... don't really know, Ben. And please don't press me."

  “All right."
/>   Ben cut to the bridge and saw it was clear except for a few clumsily erected barricades. They looked as though they had been placed there by people without full use of their mental faculties.

  Again, he said, as much aloud.

  Rosita said nothing.

  Ben radioed back to the main column. “Come on through to the bridge at Keokuk, Cec. But be careful."

  “I copy that. Ben? We just passed through a little town called Good Hope. It looked ... what was it the kids used to call it? It looked like it had been trashed."

  “I know. Same with Hamilton. No sense to it."

  “We'll be there as quickly as possible, Ben."

  “Ten-four."

  With guards on the bridge, east and west, Ben and the others cleared the bridge in a few minutes. Beneath them, the Mississippi River rolled and boiled and pounded its way south, the waters dark and angry-looking.

  “They look like they hold secrets,” Rosita said, her eyes on the Big Muddy.

  “I'm sure they do,” Ben put an arm around her shoulders, pulling her close.

  They stood for a time, without speaking, content to be close and to look at the mighty flow of water.

  “General?” one of his men called. “Look at this, sir, if you will."

  Ben and Rosita walked to where the man stood. Painted in white paint on the bridge floor, close to the railing, were these words:

  GOD HELP US ALL. WHAT MANNER OF CREATURE HAVE WE CREATED? THEY CAME IN THE NIGHT. I CANNOT LIVE LIKE THIS.

  It was unsigned.

  “He was talking about the mutant rats,” Ben said. Rosita looked at him, eyes full of doubt. “I wonder what happened to the person who wrote this?” the man who discovered the message asked.

  “He went over the side,” Rosita said.

  “Probably,” Ben agreed.

  No more was said of it until the column rolled onto the bridge. There, in the cold January winds, Ben told his people what had happened to the scouts.

  Roanna stepped forward. “General? President? What the hell are you, now?"

  Ben had to laugh at her reporter's bluntness. “How about Ben?"

  “I'll keep it ‘General.'” She then told him of the AP messages and of her sending Jane to Michigan.

  Ben was openly skeptical. “Mutant beings, Roanna? Are you serious?"

  “Yes, I am. Same copy that told of mutant rats. Received the same night from AP."

  Ben shook his head in disbelief.

  “It's highly possible, Ben,” Cecil said, as the cold winds whipped around them. “I seem to recall hearing some doctor say after the initial wave of bombings that God alone would know what type of mutations the radiation would bring in animals and humans."

  When Ben finally spoke, his words were hard and firm. “Now I don't want a lot of panic to come out of this. None of us know what happened to our scouts. They were killed. By what or whom, I don't know. What I do know is this: we are going to make the Tri-States. Home, at least for a while. We've got rough country to travel, and we've been lucky so far. I expect some firefights before we get home. So all of us will stay alert.

  “We'll be traveling through some ... wild country; country that has not been populated for more than a decade. It's possible we'll see some ... things we aren't ... haven't witnessed before. I hope not. But let's be prepared for anything. When we do stop at motels, we'll double the guards and stay alert. But I don't want panic and talk of monsters. Let's move out. We'll stay on 196 all the way across northern Missouri.

  “Let's go, people."

  The column of survivors rolled into Missouri and continued westward.

  Toward the Tri-States.

  Home.

  Five

  HOMEWARD BOUND...

  The column rolled all the rest of that day and all that night, stopping only to fuel the vehicles. They angled south at Bethany and entered Kansas between St. Joseph and Kansas City. Kansas City had taken a small nuclear pop and would be “hot” for many centuries.

  They wanted to avoid as much of Nebraska as possible, for that state had taken several strikes back in ‘88, and, like Kansas City, was hot.

  They kept rolling, hitting heavier snow, and Ben kept pushing them westward.

  They picked up Highway 36 and stayed with it until Ben finally called a halt in central Kansas. They had rolled almost five hundred miles and had not seen one living human being.

  It was eerie.

  The men and women were exhausted, for they had been forced to stop many times to push abandoned vehicles out of the road, to clear small bridges, and to backtrack when the road became impossible.

  At a small motel complex, just large enough to accommodate them all—if they doubled and tripled up in the rooms—the tired band of survivors sprayed and boiled and washed and disinfected the area. They went to sleep without even eating.

  When they awakened the next morning, after having slept a full twelve hours, they found themselves snowed in tight.

  * * * *

  Ben was, as usual, the first one up and out of bed on the morning the silent snow locked them in. Blizzard or not, Ben knew a patrol had to be sent into town for kerosene to keep the heaters going.

  Either that or freeze.

  Before opening the motel door, to face the bitter cold and blowing snow and winds, Ben looked back at the sleeping beauty of Rosita.

  Not much more than a child, he thought. A deadly child, he reminded himself, or Dan Gray would never have sent her out on her own, but still very young.

  Bitter thoughts of his own age came to him. He shook them off. Thompson in hand, he stepped from the room, quietly closing the door behind him.

  A sentry turned at the soft bootsteps in the snow. “Sir?"

  “Get someone to put chains on my truck. I'm going into town."

  “Alone, sir!"

  Ben looked at the young man for a moment. “Yes,” he said impetuously, suddenly weary of being constantly bird-dogged and watched and guarded.

  Goddamn it, he had wandered this nation alone, traveling thousands of miles alone, back in ‘88 and ‘89. He didn't need a nursemaid now.

  Fifteen minutes later he was driving into the small town of Phillipsburg. He found a service station and pulled in. There, he found a half dozen 55-gallon drums of kerosene. He wondered how old they were. He pried the cap off one and stuck a rag into the liquid. Away from the drums, he lit the rag. The flame danced in the blowing snow.

  He radioed back to the motel, telling the radioman where to find the kerosene and to send people in to get it. And to leave him alone.

  He knew he was behaving foolishly; but Ben suddenly needed space—time alone. He drove slowly into the town, stopping on the main street and parking the truck. He got out and began walking.

  The town was dead. Lifeless. Like all the others the convoy had rolled through. Dead dots on a once busy map.

  He knew it had not always been so. For this was farming and ranching country, and he recalled back in ‘89 when he traveled through Kansas, telling people of President Hilton Logan's plan to relocate the people. The people of this area, as well as most other farming areas, had simply refused to leave.

  But now they had left.

  At least their spirits had.

  He pushed open the door of a drug store and stepped inside. He smiled as he noticed an old-fashioned soda fountain and counter. He sat down on a stool and looked at his reflection in the mirror. Memories came rushing back to him—forty-year-old memories. Cherry Cokes and Elvis Presley; peppermint lipstick and sock hops; young kisses, all full of passion and wanting-to-do-IT, but so afraid. Of drive-in movies and seeing entertainers performing on the tops of the concession stands. Narvel Felts and Joe Keene and Dale Hawkins...

  and

  that special girl.

  What was her name?

  My God! what an injustice—I can't even remember her name.

  Ben looked at his deeply tanned and lined face; the gray in his hair. Memories came in a rush, flooding and fillin
g him.

  “Let the Good Times Roll” sang Shirley & Lee.

  But they will never roll again, Ben thought. Not for me.

  I am growing old. But Rosita says I have fifty more years.

  He shook his head.

  I hope not.

  Why? a silent voice asked. Why do you say that? Don't you want to see this nation rebuilt and restore itself?

  “It won't,” Ben muttered. “No matter what I do—it will not happen."

  “What won't?” a voice jarred him out of his reverie.

  Ben almost ruptured himself spinning off the stool, the Thompson coming up, finger tightening on the trigger.

  “Whoa!” the man shouted. “I'm harmless."

  The man looked to be in his mid to late sixties. A pleasant-appearing man.

  “Who in the hell are you?” Ben asked, his heart slamming in his chest.

  “My God!” the man whispered. “It's President Raines."

  “No more,” Ben sat back on the stool. He continued holding the Thompson, the muzzle pointing at the floor. “The government has been dissolved."

  “So I heard,” the man replied. He smiled. “Relax, Mister Raines. I own this drug store. I'm a pharmacist. I don't have the plague, I assure you. What drugs are you taking?"

  Ben told him.

  “Don't overdo it; too much can kill as well as cure. The disease is tapering off now; but it will come back with a vengeance this spring or summer. Save what medications you have left until then."

  “I was hoping it had run its course."

  “It is a good way of describing the disease, Mister Raines. I have never heard of any disease moving quite as fast as this one did—or be so unresponsive to proper medication."

  “You're the first living soul I've seen in seven hundred miles."

  The man smiled. “There are survivors, sir. Let me warn you of that. The thugs and hoodlums and filth are out and moving—doing what people of that particular ilk do. The decent folks are hiding, quietly getting together at night. You are alone—why?"

  “I'm not alone,” Ben told him. “I've got a full company of troops staying at the motel. Are you the only survivor in this town?"