Survivor (The Ashes Book 36)

by William W. Johnstone

  They walked across the road, glanced up and down it—nothing—then crossed it and continued until they were at the front gate. It was held by a regular latch. Jim disengaged it and they entered. Bev followed him partway up the brick path, and then was surprised when he didn’t continue to the front door. Rather, he veered off toward one side, the business end of the AK-47 raised.

  He walked slowly around the house, Bev following, and as he went she was surprised. He stepped so lightly that she could hardly hear his footfalls, and she got the sense that she was following an animal rather than a man. If she hadn’t earlier gotten a sense that this man had lived in the mountains, she had now.

  He stopped at every window and tried to look in, but he couldn’t. In every instance, the blinds or drapes or other window coverings had been pulled. Somebody, it occurred to Bev, did not want anyone looking in—or maybe out.

  A couple of times he stopped and held up his hand for her to do the same, and once put an ear against one of the windows.

  In the back of the house there was a beautiful multilevel redwood deck. It had some handsome wooden chairs on it. The woods had been cleared around it to a distance of about fifty feet and the grass was dotted with flower beds.

  Jim went down the other side of the house, glanced in a window—blinds pulled as on the others—and as he approached the front of the house he raised his weapon. Bev followed suit.

  They had noticed when they first came to the front of the house that the blinds had been pulled in the windows on both sides of the front door. “I don’t see any fresh vehicle or man tracks,” Jim said quietly, “so the house is probably empty. But one never knows.”

  He smiled. God, Bev thought, this guy was cool. She felt nervous, but in control of herself.

  He proceeded toward the front door, motioning to Bev to stop as he got within a few yards of the door, but he did not walk out in front of it. He was well aware that someone standing behind it could fire through the door. Though oak, it would not withstand a fusillade of shots, which would kill whoever was standing there.

  Instead, he kneeled down and sort of scuttled up to the door. Anyone shooting would fire over his head, expecting that the kill zone would be at least five feet off the ground.

  He tried the doorknob with his left hand. It turned. He pushed the door open an inch with the muzzle of his weapon. No one fired. He pushed the door back, stepping out of the potential line of fire.

  He waited a moment, listening, then walked in, AK-47 leveled, quickly scanning as he entered the living room. He knew Bev was behind him. She also had her TT-33 up, both of her hands on it as she had seen in movies.

  The house was not trashed outside, but it certainly had been inside. Against the far wall was a built-in unit with cubicles, like boxes, for holding a wide variety of stuff, everything from a television to knickknacks and vases with flowers in them. But the cubicles were empty. The contents had been pulled out onto the polished wood floor in an obvious attempt to find valuables.

  Everything else was a mess as well. A couch and two chairs had been ripped up and virtually disassembled. The base molding had been pried off and the electrical outlets pulled out.

  Jim lowered his AK-47 and Bev followed suit. Jim turned and made a silence gesture with his finger over his mouth and just stood there. She knew that he was listening for any sign that someone might be in the house.

  He moved and continued his scanning of the living room. One of the walls was covered with built-in bookcases but there was not a single book in them. All had been pulled out, torn apart, apparently in an attempt to see if any money had been slipped between the pages.

  In essence, the room had been reduced to a pile of junk.

  Jim thought it was unlikely that anyone was still in the house, which he guessed had at least a dozen rooms, but one never knew. As he left the living room he kept his guard up, his ears peeled for sounds, just as he did when he was hunting grizzlies in the woods of northern Idaho.

  They went down a long hall, off of which were a number of rooms. Everything they saw had been torn apart, reduced to junk.

  At the back of the house was the kitchen and pantry, and there was a back door. Pots and pans and utensils were all over the floor, dishes and the like pulled out of cabinets and smashed.

  The laundry room held a very unpleasant surprise. Someone had defecated on the floor and stuck a crucifix in it. Without comment, Jim went over and pulled the cross out and went over to the sink and turned on the water. The water sputtered, but then flowed—hot. Jim washed the crucifix, dried it off with one of the T-shirts he found on the floor, and placed the statue on a shelf above a washer, leaning it against the wall so it could stand up straight. Then he used two pieces of soft cardboard to pick the crap up and went into a nearby bathroom and flushed it away.

  Bev, who had witnessed what he did, said when he returned, “Thanks for doing that.”

  “It’s the least I could do,” Jim said.

  “I bet it was the Rejects.”

  “I wouldn’t bet against you,” Jim said.

  When you’re on the road as Jim had been for weeks—the places where you can actually buy food no less find it are few and far between, so you’re reduced to your own looting of sorts. During the last few days, however, Jim had not found much of anything, so he felt doubly good when he saw, strewn all over the floor among the debris, unopened and intact, a treasure trove of canned goods, everything, at a quick glance, from tuna fish to Spam to spinach.

  “Look at these canned goods,” Jim said. “We’re going to travel in style.”

  “You mean we’re not going to starve?” Bev added.

  “Yeah, that’s what I meant,” Jim said, his face lighting up with a smile, his teeth appearing very white against his tanned skin.

  Bev’s look at him lingered. The sight of him was, she thought, doing strange things to her stomach.

  They continued their search.

  In a closet in a hall that she almost passed by, Bev hit pay dirt as well. It was a narrow closet, its contents intact. The looters had obviously neglected to go through it. In it Bev found a dozen clean, thick fluffy towels. She knew there was hot water, and she had found some soap. A winning trio!

  “Do you mind if I bathe while you go through the rest of the house?”

  “Hey, no problem,” Jim said. “No problem at all. Have a good time.”

  “See you in a few minutes,” she said, and for a flashing millisecond wondered what Jim would look like without any clothes on and in the shower with her. He looked like he had a very wiry body with a washboard for a stomach. These were decidedly un-preacher-like thoughts. But there you were.

  “By the way,” Jim said, “lock the door and take a weapon in with you.”

  “How can a gun help me clean myself?” Bev asked with a straight face.

  “If you see any cooties you can shoot them,” Jim said with an equally straight face.

  “I have to get some clean clothes from the HumVee,” she said.

  “Go ahead, I’ll watch you from the window.”

  Bev did, and two minutes later, Jim watching, stepped into the bathroom, locking the door behind her. She righted a hamper that had been knocked down and put the Glock and clean clothing on top of it. Then she peeled the clothing from her body, feeling as if she were peeling off some sort of alligator skin.

  Nude, filthy, stinking, she turned on the shower and manipulated the hot water handle. It didn’t take long before the hot water was flowing, so hot it steamed, and Bev turned it down and turned on the cold water. When the mix was perfect she stepped under it.

  “Hallelujah,” she said softly. “Praise the Lord and pass the soap.” And then she was lost in the luxuriant feeling of applying soap to her slick skin.

  Jim waited until he heard the click of the bathroom door lock, then headed toward what he thought was the only other downstairs room left to check, the garage. There was a door to it off the kitchen. He opened it and was immediately a
ccosted by the smell of oil and chemicals.

  The condition of the garage told the story. Tools, lumber, and other materials were strewn all over the floor of the empty room. Here, too, a search had been made but apparently not as thoroughly as the other rooms, because there were a few paint cans on a shelf that had not been touched.

  He scanned the rest of the room—there was no car. The last of the walls, the one that was behind him when he had stepped in through the door, had a surprise, and confirmed that this was the work of the Rejects. Someone had used green spray paint to paint the words god is dead all over one masonry wall.

  Jim found himself pissed and he went over to the shelf where the spray cans were and selected one with orange paint. Then he walked back across the room, shaking the can as he went to distribute the paint, and then used it to obliterate the obscenity.

  Then he went back inside the house and as he passed the bathroom he heard Bev singing something. He stopped to listen. She was singing “Rock of Ages.” Jim had heard it before and liked it and he just lingered there, the sound enveloping his body as the warm water was enveloping Bev—even though she was butchering the song. He smiled, recalling a favorite expression of his grandfather: “Don’t give up your day job, honey!”

  He debated whether to leave Bev alone in the shower while he went upstairs. But she had brought the Glock in with her and the search should only take him a few minutes. She would be all right. He knew that if anyone approached the house he would know it. For a moment, he thought that maybe he should have brought Reb in with them but then decided against it.

  He climbed polished, elegant oak stairs to the second-floor landing and once up there he was accosted again, though very faintly, by the smell of death.

  There was a full bath directly across from the stairway and five rooms leading off the hall, which extended to both his left and right. The lavatory and three of the rooms had their doors open and one had it closed. It wasn’t hard to figure where the foul smell was coming from. Someone had stuffed a towel along the space under the closed door on the third room down.

  He went into each of the rooms where the doors were open, and predictably they had been trashed. The first one he looked at was a master bedroom, and here again he found evidence of sacrilege. There was a painting of Jesus Christ on the wall, and someone had sprayed brown paint all over it.

  One was the room of a teenage girl, which he could tell from the young feminine touches and the canopy over the bed, one was the room of a teenage boy, one of a young boy, and one was a guest room, Jim thought, and another was empty.

  Sadness surged in Jim—and anger. It was so sad that people who had once enjoyed so many privileges and rights in the greatest country that ever existed should now not even have the right to live in their own homes, the right that a lot of people had risked their lives for, and died for. Goddamn bastards.

  Jim took out a handkerchief and put it over his nose. If the smell was coming through the door, it would be much more potent, of course, inside the room. He turned the knob and pushed the door open.

  The smell was not as bad as he thought, and whoever or whatever or wherever the smell was coming from was not immediately apparent. The room was a study, every single inch of the walls covered with bookshelves, but as was the situation downstairs, all of the books had been pulled out of the bookcases and onto the floor, which was so covered with books it was barely visible. A number of the books had their pages pulled out of them, perhaps, Jim thought, because the looters found nothing and were enraged.

  There was a large oak desk in front of a bay window, but nothing on it except what looked like a leather-bound journal, or diary. It was open, and something was written on one of the pages.

  Jim picked his way through the piles of books and glanced behind the desk. The source of the smell was there. It was the body of a man, lying on his back, his eyes open, pupils fixed and dilated, who had only recently died. He was past rigor mortis, Jim guessed, but there was extensive lividity and he was just starting to smell.

  The man was bald except for a fringe of dark hair and a short goatee. There was a small red hole in the middle of his forehead. He had been shot, Jim thought, judging from the size of the hole, with a small-caliber weapon, probably a .22. He was fully dressed, complete with vest. Jim also guessed that, granted all the books, he was some sort of professor.

  Jim covered the remains with a blanket from a nearby couch and leaned over the desk so he could read the journal.

  The page began: I strongly suspect, despite the rather ludicrous claims from our government that the bug came from outer space, the virus that is rapidly killing off the world’s population was homegrown, right here on earth. I believe it was an experiment gone awry, released into the air quite by accident from some top-secret lab, perhaps even one financed by our own government. I . . .

  That was all that was written.

  Lying, Jim thought. The U.S. government was lying? So what the hell else was new?

  Jim wondered who the dead man was. He flipped the journal back to the first page, and there was a sticker on it with the name Harold Charles, Ph.D.

  Definitely a teacher.

  Jim put the book down, and as he did he saw, on the floor among the books, what looked like a diploma—at least the paper was parchmentlike—and he reached down and picked it up and turned it over. It was something else that he decided to read when he was downstairs. He disliked leaving Bev alone longer.

  He left the room, closing the door behind him and replacing the towel.

  He went downstairs and stood in the hall. The water in the bathroom was off and Bev had stopped singing.

  SUSA Manifesto

  Freedom, like respect, is earned and must be constantly nurtured and protected from those who would take it away.

  It is the right of every law-abiding citizen to protect his or her life, liberty, and personal property by any means at hand without fear of arrest, criminal prosecution, or lawsuit. The right to bear arms is central to maintaining true personal freedom.

  That liberal politicians, theorists, and socialists are the greatest threat to freedom-loving Americans. Their misguided efforts have caused grave injustices in the fields of criminal law, education, and public welfare.

  Therefore in respect to criminal law:

  An effective criminal justice system should be guided by these basic tenets:

  - Our courts must stop pampering criminals.

  - The punishment must fit the crime.

  - Justice must be fair but also be swift and, if necessary, harsh.

  - There is no perfect society, only a fair one.

  Therefore in respect to education:

  Education is the key to solving problems in society and the lack of it is the root cause of America’s decline.

  An effective system of education:

  - Must stress hard discipline along with the arts, sciences, fine music, and basic skills in reading, writing, and mathematics.

  - Must teach fairness and respect.

  - Must teach morals, the dignity of labor, and the value of family.

  Therefore in respect to welfare:

  Welfare (we prefer workfare) is reserved only for the elderly, the infirm, and those who need a temporary helping hand. And the welfare system must also:

  - Instill the concept that everyone must work if able and be forced to work if necessary.

  - Instill the concept that there is no free lunch and that being productive in a free society is the only honorable path to take.

  That racial prejudice and bigotry are intolerable in a free and vital society.

  No one is worthy of respect simply because of the color of their skin.

  Respect is earned by actions and by deeds, not by birthright.

  There are only two types of people on earth, decent and indecent. Those who are decent will flourish, those who are indecent will perish.

  No laws laid down by a body of government can make one person like another.
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  A free and just society must be protected at all costs even if it means shedding the blood of its citizens. The willingness of citizens to lay down their lives for the belief in freedom is a cornerstone of true democracy; without that willingness the structure of society will surely crumble and fall into the ashes of history.

  Therefore:

  Along with the inalienable right to bear arms, and the inalienable right to personal protection, a strong, skilled, and well-equipped military is essential to maintaining a free society.

  A strong military eliminates the need for “allies,” allowing the society to focus on the needs of its citizens.

  The business of citizens is not the business of the world unless the rights of citizens are infringed upon by outside forces.

  The duty of those who live in a free society is clear. Personal freedom is not negotiable.

  In conclusion:

  We who support the tri-state philosophy and live by its code and its laws pledge to defend it by any means necessary. We pledge to work fairly and justly to build and maintain a society without fear and without intervention.

  General Ben Raines

  Jim nodded. Yes, he was lucky to have met Ben Raines. A great man had written these things. Ben Raines was a great man.

  Not thirty seconds after he finished reading the manifesto, Bev came out of the bathroom.

  “I feel a hundred percent better,” she said. “Now it’s your turn.”

  Jim looked at her for a moment. She was really a beautiful woman, with her large dark eyes even more striking against the newly washed paleness of her skin, and for a moment Jim thought that she had put on lipstick. But she hadn’t. Her lips were naturally that red. She had on her new clothing, and now she smelled good. Real good.

  Jim told her about finding the dead man and what he had written in the journal.

  “That’s what my father suspected, too,” Bev said.

  “Could be,” Jim replied, “but we’ll probably never know for sure. It certainly makes more sense than things from outer space . . .” His voice trailed off.