Fury in the Ashes

by William W. Johnstone

  From the south, General Payon’s army had pushed up nearly four miles and was holding.

  In Los Angeles, the Rebels were on a roll that could not be contained by the punks and creepies remaining in the city. The Rebels were fighting night and day, crushing any who dared face them. All logical avenues of escape had been cut off by the Rebels. Snipers were posted all around the territory still in punk hands, and the sharpshooters were deadly.

  In the City of the Angels, all that remained was mopping up.

  “We estimate thirty-five thousand dead,” Cecil reported to Ben. “Fifteen thousand broke free. Of those, probably five thousand are wounded, half of them wounded so badly they won’t survive their wounds.”

  “Our casualties?” Ben asked.

  “Extremely light considering the amount of territory we’ve taken. It’s all but over here in Los Angeles, Ben. I’m sending Georgi and his people down to assist you.”

  “That’s ten-four, Cec. We’re facing no organized resistance here. With another battalion to help us, we can wrap this up in a few days.”

  “Maybe not, Ben,” Cecil cautioned. “Doctor Chase just got word back from Base Camp One. Many of those people down there are infected with a virus that is airborne. It’s deadly, Ben. And our lab people don’t have a vaccine for it.”

  “All right, Cec. I’m halting all advances now and sealing off the city.”

  “I’ll wrap it up here and be down to join you just as quickly as possible, Ben.”

  “That’s ten-four, Cec. Eagle out.”

  Ben turned to Corrie. “Order all advances halted, Corrie. Advise General Payon to hold what he’s got. Tell him I advise taking no prisoners. He won’t like it anymore than we do, but he’ll see the reasoning behind it. Order all Rebels to burn out a buffer zone and stay to the north and to the east of it. Shoot anyone who tries to cross it. Fires every one hundred yards at night. Lord knows we’ve got enough material on hand to keep them going.”

  Those in the city knew why the Rebel advance had been halted, or could guess why. Most knew they were walking disease factories. And most had sense enough to understand that if the Rebels would not get close to them, they must be contagious.

  “So what have we got to lose?” many said. “Let’s take some of those Rebel bastards and bitches with us. If they try to take us, we’ll bite them and spit on them.”

  The Rebels stood behind their buffer zones and waited.

  In Nevada, those punks who had broken free of Los Angeles were slowly reaching the rendezvous point.

  “Leroy’s dead,” Ishmal said. “He told me no brother would kill him. He must have gone nuts. Word I got is that General Jefferys called him a disgrace to his race and a piece of worthless shit and then shot him right between the eyes.”

  “General Jefferys sounds like my kind of spade,” Rich said with a smile.

  Bull stepped between the two men before another killing could go down. “Just cool it, boys! We got enough problems without you two havin’ at each other.”

  “Chang stepped on a pressure mine,” Fang said, once Ishmal and Rich were separated. “I seen it. Blew both his legs off. It was horrible. Most of his gang was cut down by machine-gun fire.”

  “There ain’t gonna be no stoppin’ the Rebels. Us goin’ to Alaska is only prolongin’ the end.”

  “You got a better idea?” Bull challenged.

  “No,” Fang said with a sigh. “Not unless we go straight.”

  “That’s what I’m gonna do,” a woman said. “The percentages was with us in the city. Not no more. Ben Raines ain’t gonna allow it. We’re either gonna obey the law — right down to the last letter of it — or he’s gonna shoot us. Or hang us.” She shuddered at that thought. She had personally witnessed what happened to those street punks the Rebel courts had convicted on the testimony of the freed prisoners and slaves. The Rebels had left them hanging from tree limbs. It was the ugliest sight she had ever seen. “Back in the olden days we could run to a lawyer or the ACLU or something. Not no more. I think that even if the ACLU was still around, if they was to try to step in on our behalf, Ben Raines would shoot them as fast as he would us.”

  “What are you gonna do, Betty?” Sally asked.

  “I’m gonna find me a man and then we’ll find us a piece of ground. Raise chickens and hogs and stuff. Plant a garden. I don’t know none of you people. I ain’t never seen any of you before in my life. I never heard of none of you. I don’t know where you’re goin.’ I don’t care. Good-bye.”

  Bull looked around him at the hundreds of punks who had gathered. He reflected sourly that it looked like a bunch of bums at a hobo convention. And, he surmised, that was not an unfair comparison. Sorriest-looking bunch of no-goods he had ever seen. Beaten down, whipped, and ragged.

  Every new bunch that came in from the city had a different horror story to tell, but with the same ending: Ben Raines was kicking ass.

  Betty was right; going to Alaska wasn’t really going to solve anything. Ben Raines would come after them, and he would eventually destroy them all.

  “What are you thinkin’ about, Bull?” Chico asked.

  “Our future.”

  “We ain’t got much of one,” the gang leader said. “I lost more than half of my people. And of the ones that’s left, more than half of them want to quit. Six walked off last night. I ain’t seen them since and probably won’t never see them again.”

  “We got to look at it this way. The ones that stays are the tough ones. And we got to get organized. If we’re gonna survive, Chico, we’ve got to get organized. That’s how Ben Raines does it. Organization.”

  Bobby of the Ponys said, “But that alone ain’t gonna do it. We got to find artillery and tanks and shit like that. And then we’ve got to study on how to use them. Have classes and all that crap. Hell, we may as well go straight.”

  Brute said, “Please! Must you use that word? It’s very depressing.”

  Ben had sent troops back to scour the old military bases for artillery rounds. Until they returned, there was little the Rebels surrounding San Diego could do . . . surrounding not being quite the right word.

  “Hell, they could break through practically any damn place they wanted to,” Ben said. “No telling how many thousands and thousands of people in there.” He waved a hand toward the city. “And we’ve got five ballations of troops pretending they’re containing them. Jesus!”

  The situation wasn’t quite as dismal as Ben painted it, but he was right. Those inside the three-sided box could bust out by sheer numbers in any one of dozens of places. The Rebels were stretched very thin. Only the burned-out three-block buffer zone all around the city gave them any kind of an edge.

  “That, and the fact that those inside probably think we’re much larger in numbers than we really are,” Dan said. He studied Ben’s face. “What’s troubling you, General?”

  “Waging war on the sick and dying. Oh, I know, Dan. They’re thugs and murderers and punks and slavers and no-goods, but they’re still sick and dying and many of them probably don’t have the strength to lift a weapon or the strength to bust out if they had a chance. My God, Dan, we all smell the stench of the dead in that city every day. And every day it gets worse. Oh, hell, Dan! I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’ve never had fifteen cents worth of compassion for the lawless in my life. And I don’t think compassion is the right word for what I’m presently feeling. Maybe what I’m experiencing is . . . well, that it’s morally wrong to wage war against those who don’t have the strength to fight back.”

  “Well, well,” Doctor Chase said from the open door of the command post — a former gas station on the edge of town. “Ben Raines is human after all.”

  “Come on in, you old goat,” Ben said with a smile. “Where is the rest of the crew?”

  “Right behind me a few miles. Cecil and his people are staying behind to mop up and to see what they can salvage.” He jerked his thumb south, toward the city under siege. “You’d be doing them
a favor by gassing them, Ben.”

  “If I had the gas, I’d do it, Lamar. Especially after reading the reports you sent down a few days ago.”

  “It’s got to be contained here, Ben. Right here! And then we’ve got to chase after those who break free and destroy them. Before they spread the sickness. The ones in L.A. are not nearly so communicable or deadly. Wherever they are.”

  “In Nevada. About a hundred and fifty miles east of Reno. The Woods Children are tracking them, but staying well back.”

  “Ike on the horn, General,” Corrie called. “He’s bringing in several thousand artillery rounds.”

  “General Striganov brought in some two thousand rounds,” Buddy said.

  “I know, son. I know!”

  “And I found more than a thousand rounds,” Dan added.

  Ben sighed.

  Lamar Chase could move very swiftly for a man of his years. He strode across the room, grabbed Ben by the arm, and spun him around. “Goddam-nit, Ben, listen to me! There is no vaccine. There is no magic bullet for this. We don’t have a serum. This isn’t AIDS. This isn’t TB, or VD, or anything we can treat. We don’t know what it is, we don’t know what to use to treat it — nothing that we’ve got in our medical labs over at Base Camp One. It’s a goddamn plague, Ben. It’s everything . . . oh, hell, evil! And if you don’t give the orders to destroy that city and everyone in it, we’re all going to die! Do you understand me?”

  Ben looked all around the large room. Thermopolis stood with Emil, staring at him. Ben shifted his gaze to the Russian. Georgi met his eyes without flinching. Dan and Buddy and Tina and West stared at him. The commander of Eight Battalion leaned against a wall, smoking his pipe and waiting.

  Ben walked to the open door — it was always open, the door was gone — and stared out. It was a beautiful fall day in southern California. Temperatures very mild, a bright sun, the blue of the Pacific Ocean glimmering a few miles to the west. Perfect. If one could somehow forget the stench coming from the dying city.

  He turned around and walked to his desk, taking out a map of Nevada and studying it.

  “Did you hear me?” Lamar shouted at him.

  “I heard you. Now hush up for a minute. How do you expect me to think with you screaming like a banshee?”

  After a moment, he said, “Georgi, West, Ike, and Seven and Eight Battalions will prepare for a pull-out tomorrow morning. Cecil, Therm, and Dan, Tina, and Buddy will stay with me. Advise your XOs now. Corrie, find Ike and tell him to hold up. I have orders for him.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Gather around, ladies and gentlemen. I have circled where the punks from L.A. have gathered. Georgi, you and your people will set up positions here, at the junctions of Highways 51 and 361, just to the west of the Desatoya Mountains in Nevada. Seven Battalion will set up in Tonopah, with Eight Battalion on Highway 6, blocking these two county roads. Ike will set up here, blocking highway 50 just west of Eureka. West, your people will block Highway 305 north of Austin. I want you all to roll day and night, and get in place. When you are in place, half of our planes will start napalming the area, while the other half napalms my objective.” He met the eyes of everyone gathered around. “No prisoners. Get going. Good luck.”

  Thirty-six hours after Ben had split his forces, he walked out of his CP and he and his team drove down to where artillery was in place on the northern edge of the city. It was an hour before dawn and chilly.

  “Commence firing,” he said. “And may God have mercy on my soul.”

  FIVE

  Several patrols had gone out from the punk gathering. They returned in a sweat. The gang leaders listening, sour expressions on their faces.

  Brute was the first to break the stunned silence following the reports. “Cannon to the right of them, cannon to the left of them, cannon in front of them, volley’d and thunder’d.”

  Brute then stood with astonishment on his face as Cash said, “Someone had blundered: theirs not to make reply, theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die.” He smiled at Brute. “Why not, Brute? I taught school for ten years before the Great War.”

  “What is this?” Bull thundered. “A goddamned fraternity meeting? You guys gonna kiss each other? Hell, people, we got to get gone from here!”

  “There is no place to go, Bull,” Brute told him. “All avenues of escape are blocked. It’s been raining, as if you didn’t know. These county roads are impassable. We’d have to stick to hard surfaces. And they’re blocked. This means the city of Los Angeles has fallen, and probably San Diego as well — or it will soon be obliterated from the face of the earth.”

  “Will you goddamnit speak English!” Junkyard yelled at him. “What the hell does all that mean?”

  Brute looked at him. “It means, you ignorant oaf, that we are dead!”

  “They ain’t attackin, queer-boy!” Junkyard shouted at him. “So how come you figure we dead?”

  Brute had seen the dots in the sky long before anyone could hear the drone of engines. Ben had ordered up anything that could fly. Brute drew himself up to attention and snapped a salute to the south. “I salute you, Ben Raines, we who are about to die! You won, you . . . son of a bitch!”

  “Planes!” a punk shouted.

  The old fighters came in first, machine guns yammering as they strafed the valley. The bombers dropped their payloads of napalm, the fiery liquid spreading for hundreds of yards when the bombs blew. Ike had found several old Forest Service planes, tankers that were once used for water drops. He had ordered the tanks filled with kerosene. The misery spread as the kerosene ignited. The flames seared the valley and cooked the punks as plane after plane roared in and dropped their loads of napalm.

  The old fighter planes were circling as the bombers did their work, then they returned, making pass after pass, machine guns howling and spitting. The vehicles of the punks exploded as the flames reached them. The ammunition belted around the waists and shoulders of the punks began popping as the fire touched them.

  Cash of the Surfers stood on a boulder and screamed curses at the fighters, firing a pistol at the planes. The .50-caliber guns of a fighter stitched him, knocking him off the huge rock and separating his head from his shoulders.

  Ishmal of the Boogies ran screaming from the inferno, his eyes wide with fear. A napalm bomb exploded directly in from of him and the flames dissolved the gang leader.

  Chico of the Swords had been thrown to the ground by an explosion, and had just staggered to his feet when a fighter plane came roaring in on a low pass. The .50-caliber machine guns tore him apart.

  Junkyard made it out of the inferno and got to his car — an old Cadillac painted pink — and was trying to get the aged engine to turn over. Rich appeared at the window, a pistol in each hand.

  “I never did like you, so I’d rather do this myself,” Rich said. He shot Junkyard in the head just as a fighter roared in, machine guns howling. The slugs sent Rich on a wild dance into death.

  Bobby lay on the ground, both legs gone, and watched as his blood poured out. He died calling for his mother.

  The long narrow valley had been turned into a blazing, screaming crematorium. Charred bodies lay in every grotesque shape imaginable. Punks staggered through the carnage, blind from the intense heat, and called out for help. They begged for mercy just as their many victims over the years had begged for mercy. And just like their victims, the punks received only pain and the dark laughter of the grim reaper.

  Bull and part of his gang made it clear, as did Sally, Fang, and Brute and a few of their followers.

  “Dear God in Heaven!” Sally panted, as she lay on the ground a mile from the smoking valley. “I’ll change my ways if You’ll just give a chance. Please, God, I don’t want to die!”

  Bull laughed at her. “How many times have you heard that last bit from the people you ordered tortured to death, you stupid cunt?”

  “Screw you!” Sally spat at him.

  “Not now, bitch. We ain’t got time. W
e got to hunt us a hole and stay put.”

  “We have no food, no water, and we can’t build a fire to get warm,” Brute said with finality. “We’ve had it.”

  “I can’t believe we’re the only ones who made it out,” Fang said, looking at the small band of survivors. “There’s less than a hundred of us.”

  “A bunch made it out,” Bull said. “Several thousand, I’d guess. But we don’t want to hook up with them. We’re better off in small groups. We hole up during the day and move only at night. They’s a river to the northwest of us. We can go a couple of days without water. If we can make the river, we’re home free. Let’s get in that little bit of timber over yonder and keep out of sight.”

  For the first time in years, Sally put her head to the ground and began weeping at the sheer hopelessness of it all.

  Ben watched the destruction of the city through binoculars. He watched until the smoke became so thick he could no longer see what was taking place. But then he didn’t have to see — he knew.

  The few planes he had kept for himself were making pass after pass, first dropping napalm into the heart of the city, and then working out in three directions. Those attempting to flee the flames were cut down by the troops positioned outside the buffer zone.

  General Payon had moved his men forward, sealing off the south end and swinging some troops around to help the Rebels more effectively cover the southeast corner of the territory. General Payon and Ben Raines met for the first time.

  The men shook hands and sat down for a cup of coffee.

  “It’s a terrible, terrible thing we are forced to do, General Raines,” Payon said. “But when is war ever nice? But this business” — he nodded toward the burning city — “is especially repugnant.”

  “Yes. I investigated every other avenue. My medical people said it had to be this way. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

  “I put thugs up against the wall in my country,” Payon said, his words soft. “They were killers, thieves, rapists, every kind of lowlife. They begged me not to shoot them, promised to God they would chance their ways. At first, when my army was small and the good people were still very disorganized, I listened to them beg and my heart was so heavy. I turned them loose, took them at their word. The next day they were back stealing and raping and killing.” He shook his head. “I had to become hard — as you did. I had to think of the . . . larger picture, of the future. The leopard does not change its spots, as the saying goes.”