Out of the Ashes ta-1

by William Wallace Johnstone

  Shit!

  “You’re serious, Ben?” Big eyes wide. Pretty eyes.

  “I consider death to be very serious, Fran.”

  “Well… exactly, what does this mean?”

  “It means,” Ben said slowly, “that you’re stuck with me, and I suppose I’m stuck with you.”

  “Oh, Lord!” she said, then rolled her eyes and fainted.

  Ben caught her just before she cracked her head on the blacktop.

  “What a marvelous way to start a relationship,” he muttered.

  FIVE

  She opened her blue eyes and looked at him as they rolled along the parish road. “Where are you taking me?”

  “Where would you like to go, Miss Fran?”

  She closed her eyes. “I don’t know.”

  “Then shut up and help me look until you decide. And open your eyes. Look for people—alive. There’s got to be some in this parish.”

  “All the wrong sort, I’m sure.”

  You may be correct there, Ben thought. “Just look, baby, and keep your social comments to yourself.”

  “What is that big ugly thing?”

  Ben looked down to see if his fly was open.

  “This!” She touched the Thompson.

  “It’s a submachine gun.”

  She looked at Ben, looked at the SMG, rolled her eyes, then looked out the window, her side of the truck. She shook her head.

  “It’s real, Fran. I assure you of that.”

  “I’m beginning to believe, Ben. Look. There’s smoke coming from that house over there.” She pointed, saying it with about as much interest as if she were discussing the price of kumquats in the supermarket.

  The day was cool, temperature in the low sixties. But not cool enough for a fire, Ben reckoned. He pulled into the drive and looked for dogs. None. “Stay in the truck,” he told Fran.

  “I most certainly will not! And don’t you dare order me about, Ben Raines.”

  Ben nodded, wondering when she was going into shock. Probably, he guessed, when we drive through town and she sees all the bodies… with the birds and the dogs and the hogs eating on them.

  “Then come with me,” he said. “No play on words intended.”

  She opened the door.

  “There might be fifteen guys in there, all ready to rape you.”

  She closed the door and locked it.

  Ben checked to see if he’d taken the keys out of the ignition. He had. It would be just like Fran to drive off and leave him.

  He walked up the stone walkway and tapped on the door. He held the Thompson in his right hand. The door swung slowly open. Ben did not know the man, but had seen him in town a number of times. In his early sixties, the man appeared to be in good health.

  “Afternoon,” Ben said, speaking through the screen door. “I’m Ben Raines.”

  “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” the man replied.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Armageddon. The battle has been fought. So sayeth the Lord.”

  Although not a student of the Bible, Ben had read it. He asked, “Who won—Good or Evil?”

  The question seemed to confuse the man. He stammered for a few seconds, then closed his mouth and shook his head.

  “Do you realize what has happened?” Ben asked.

  “Armageddon.”

  Ben sighed and looked past the man into the living room of the home. A fire was raging in the fireplace and a woman was sitting in a chair. She was dead. Ben could smell her from the porch.

  “Do you want to come with us?” Ben asked. “Can we help in any way?”

  The man shut the door in Ben’s face.

  He walked back to the truck and unlocked the door. As they were driving away, Fran asked, “Who was that man?”

  “I don’t know.” Then he told her what he had seen.

  “That’s awful. What are you going to do about it?”

  “Nothing.” Ben shook his head. “Nothing I can do. I’m not a psychiatrist. But I’d say the man has stepped over the line. Pushed over it by what happened. He may come back around; he may not.”

  “That’s a pretty cold-blooded attitude, Ben. That poor old man.”

  “Those poor old people who died from exposure,” Ben countered.

  She glared at him while Ben wondered if this was another side of her, or if she was merely acting for his benefit. “You keep harping on that, Ben Raines. What would you have had me do about them?—Not that it matters at this date.”

  “Help them.” His reply was terse.

  “I see,” she said. “Well… I would have thought—from reading your books—not that I’ve read many of them, you understand—that you would be the last person in the world to advocate wealth redistribution. I thought you were a conservative.”

  “I am a conservative, Fran, in most of my thinking. But I just do not like to see innocent people suffer needlessly. Not when enormous wealth is—was—piled all around them. As for wealth redistribution… it was coming, Fran. It would have been a reality before the end of the century.”

  “My daddy said that was communism.”

  “While he sat sipping his hundred-year-old cognac, admiring his antiques, in a house valued at about a million dollars—none of those things did he, personally, lift a finger to earn. I don’t buy it, Fran. But it’s all moot now, isn’t it? We’re all equal.”

  She shuddered at the thought of being equal with everybody. How… unfair!

  They drove for another few hours, but saw no signs of life in the parish. Ben pointed the nose of the truck toward Fran’s mansion. She was unusually silent.

  “I’m going to take you back to your home, Fran—you can pick up some clothes. Then we’ll go to my place. Don’t worry, you’ll be safe.”

  “All right,” she whispered.

  Ben waited in the huge den of the home while Fran filled several suitcases. Ben had never seen such wealth in all his life. He chuckled, thinking, Hell of a lot of good it did them in the long run.

  I guess, he mused, if I had all this, I’d fight to keep it, too. Or would I? he questioned. I’ve never even dreamed of living like this.

  He had never dreamed that grandly. He had not been raised to dream of wallowing in great luxury.

  He helped Fran with her luggage, then, back on the blacktop, she said, “What are we going to do, Ben?”

  “First off, don’t look at the bodies in that field just up ahead. There aren’t as many as I thought, but enough.”

  Naturally, she looked, and promptly got sick.

  Ben stopped the truck and let her out to barf by the side of the road. He stood outside the truck, Thompson at the ready, on the lookout for dogs.

  “I hate to be sick!” she said, wiping her mouth with the handkerchief Ben had offered.

  “You’ll get used to the bodies,” he said. “I remember in training, the first time I ever ate dog meat. I—”

  She doubled over and began up-chucking again. She straightened up, wiped her mouth, tossed the handkerchief in the ditch, and said, “Goddamn you!”

  “Sorry,” Ben said, motioning her back in the truck. “And I mean that, Fran. Fran?” She looked at him. “You’ve got urp on your sleeve.”

  She nodded, brushed at the urp, then waved her hand forward, like a scout with a wagon train.

  “Head ’em up and move ’em out,” Ben muttered.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “How old are you, Fran?”

  “Twenty-eight.”

  “You probably wouldn’t remember that TV show, then.”

  “I’m sure it was violent and ugly.”

  Ben sighed.

  She was silent until they had driven through the small town with the odor of death hanging over it. Then she said, “Let’s be honest with each other, Ben. I don’t like you, and I probably will never like you very much.”

  “Agreed.”

  “But we’re stuck with each other.”

  “How true.”

&
nbsp; “All right, then. For however long we are forced to keep company with each other—and I assure you, it will not be long—let’s try to be civil, if not friends.”

  Ben grinned. “O.K., Fran.”

  “I don’t like to cook; won’t cook. I hate any type of housework, refuse to pick up after myself, and I whine when I don’t get my way.”

  Ben laughed at her honesty. “Do you do windows?”

  She laughed for the first time that day. “No! But”—she looked at him, appraising him through frankly sexual eyes—“I don’t like to sleep alone.”

  “That’s a fair trade-off, I suppose,” Ben said.

  Fran didn’t drink; gave her hives, she said. So Ben stayed sober that night. The first time in years, other than when he was sick or visiting his parents, he went to bed completely sober, and was glad he did.

  Fran came to him, in his bed, smelling of subtle perfume and naked, her dark hair fanning the pillow beside him. As his hands found her, stroking her, and his lips worked at her breasts, she moaned and found him, working his penis into hardness. She straddled him, guiding him into her wetness, taking him with one hard, hunching motion. And from that moment on, for a half-hour, Fran had been, as one good ol’ boy had described his events of the night before to a group of buddies, “a frantic fuck.” She might not be worth a damn for anything else, Ben reflected, but she knew what she wanted when it came to sex; how she wanted it, and how to get the most out of what was stuck in her.

  Ben left her sleeping to stand by the window in the den, gazing out at the darkness. He knew the full impact of what had happened had not yet come home to him—not in its awful entirety… its horrible finality.

  Certainly, it had not struck home with Fran. Out of one hundred percent total, she maybe, at the most, was admitting to herself ten percent of the appalling facts surrounding her.

  Ben suddenly made up his mind: there was no point in staying here. He wanted to see what had happened around the nation. He wanted to… bury (the word had finally become acceptable in his mind) his parents, brothers, and sisters. If he could find them.

  And, as a writer, he was a naturally curious sort of person. He wished he could see years into the future, see just what would be built out of all this tragedy. Out of the ashes.

  Something far better than what we had just destroyed, he hoped.

  He went back into the bedroom and slipped quietly into bed. Fran snuggled close to him, murmuring softly, something inaudible.

  Despite his feeling toward her, Ben felt a soft prodding of sorrow for the young woman. Her type of person had always bought her way through the world. Now… what would happen to people like that? Ben knew most of them were not survivors.

  He took her into his arms, her nakedness warm against him, and despite the excitement building in him as he awaited the dawning, finally drifted off into sleep.

  “I still don’t understand why we have to leave.” Fran pouted, looking back at Ben’s house as they pulled out.

  “Aren’t you curious, Fran? Aren’t you the least bit curious to see what has happened?”

  “I just wish everything would go back to what it used to be. The way it was.”

  The rich getting richer and the poor contemplating armed revolution, Ben thought. “It might be that way again, Fran. But it’s going to take years.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said.

  “I’ll think about that tomorrow.” Ben grinned.

  She turned her head away and looked out the window.

  Ben drove back into town and stopped at the sheriff’s office, picking up another gas mask. He had a hunch they would need masks along the way.

  They drove over the Mississippi River bridge at Natchez, with Ben having to stop three times to move vehicles. It was then the gas mask came in handy, for the occupants of the stalled cars and trucks were in bad shape, having been sealed up inside the vehicles, practically airtight. He made up his mind that when he got into Natchez, he would change vehicles, get one with a winch on the front and heavy-duty springs, for there was some other gear he wanted to pick up along the way.

  At a dealership, Ben walked around the trucks, finally selecting a demonstrator that had all the equipment he needed, including a CB radio.

  “I still don’t see why we can’t pick up a Cadillac or Lincoln,” Fran bitched, as she helped transfer the gear. “Then we could travel in some degree of comfort instead of bouncing along in a stupid pickup truck like a couple of gypsies.”

  Ben realized there was no point in trying to explain, so he kept his mouth shut.

  The stench in Natchez was horrendous, and Ben, fearing disease, made Fran put on her gas mask. He drove quickly through the small city, heading east, where he would intersect with Interstate 55.

  “This mask is hot!” Fran griped, her voice muffled.

  Ben said nothing, but when she attempted to remove the mask before they were through the city, he let her. She quickly put it back on, her face pale as the odor hit her nostrils.

  They saw no humans alive on the sixty-mile run to the interstate, just west of Brookhaven, but the carrion and dogs were having a feast.

  “Just keep your eyes straight ahead,” Ben told her. That, he did not have to repeat twice. She closed her eyes and kept them closed.

  Common sense told Ben to skirt Jackson, but his natural curiosity overwhelmed caution and he exited off the interstate and drove into downtown Jackson.

  “Oh, God!” Fran cried, as she looked at the bodies littering the streets. “Ben, let’s get out of here.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to drive up to the Metrocenter and do a little shopping, honey? Just think of all the nice items you could pick up—literally.”

  Her glance told him what he could do with his suggestion.

  As they were turning around, a bullet slammed through the top of the windshield and Fran screamed.

  Man is not that far from the caves, not that far from fighting over turf, food, women, survival. And if that man has been a part of any rough branch of service, if he took his training seriously, and if he has the slightest hint of pugnacity in him, that man will quickly revert back to barbarism.

  Over Fran’s screaming as Ben shoved her to the floorboard, he spun the wheel hard and slid behind an overturned garbage truck, effectively hiding the pickup and giving them cover.

  “Stay down!” he told her.

  This time she gave no static. She nodded her head, her eyes wide.

  It all returned to Ben, everything piled on him in a rush of brutal memories: the dehumanizing training in the jungles, the mountains, the deserts, the deep timber. The months in Nam. The quick, white-hot fire fights. Survive.

  “Hey!” Ben yelled across the littered street. “We don’t mean you any harm. What’s the idea of shooting at us?” But in his mind his thoughts were not peaceful. Just expose yourself, you son of a bitch. Just give me something to shoot at.

  “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 t
he 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.