Survival in the Ashes

by William W. Johnstone

“Maybe we didn’t have a chance to begin with. You ever thought of that?”

  “What am I going to hear now, some crap about your misspent childhood? Or maybe the coach wouldn’t let you play or you had pimples or some other equally terrible traumatic youthful experience that caused you to turn bad? Which is it, and it better be something original, because I’ve heard all the rest and I wasn’t impressed.”

  The man’s eyes met those of Ben and lingered only briefly. He dropped his gaze with a low curse. “You’re a hard bastard, aren’t you, Ben Raines?”

  “Yes, I am. And I’ll admit that I’ve had some few successes in rehabilitating the criminal element. But I had something there to work with. You’re a total loss, partner.”

  “How do you know that by just looking at me?”

  “I don’t. It’s a guess.”

  “I don’t get a another chance?”

  Ben studied the man for a moment. “Tell you what. I’ll let you come on through if you’ll agree to take some tests.”

  The man grew wary. “What kind of tests?”

  “PSE tests. Polygraph tests. Drug-induced hypnosis. We’ll be asking you questions about your past and of your thoughts for the future. Questions about decency and criminal history and, oh, just all sorts of interesting and fascinating topics. If you pass, you’re in. How about it, partner?”

  The man cussed him, loud and long, until he was breathless. He knew he was going to die, now or in a few hours, so that short a span of living really didn’t mean all that much.

  When he paused for breath, Ben said, “That will be all. You may return to your sector and prepare to die.”

  “You ain’t human, Raines! There ain’t no human man can be that hard to another.”

  Ben’s smile was thin. “Have you ever raped?”

  “Yeah. I’ve took pussy by force. So what? The whole goddamn world is turned upside down. There ain’t no damn laws!” he screamed the last.

  “Have you enslaved people and sexually abused young children?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I have. Again, so what? It’s the law of the jungle out here.”

  “You really believe you were justified in doing that? You believe it’s the law of the jungle out here?”

  “Yes, to both questions. The biggest and toughest animal wins.”

  Ben pulled out his .45 and shot the man between the eyes. Holstering his pistol, he looked at the cooling body and said, “In that case, the big Eagle just won.”

  SEVENTEEN

  The Rebels struck the town at dawn, throwing everything they had at the town and its defenders from the east. To the west, Six Battalion had worked feverishly throughout the night setting up Claymores and other devilish devices of surprise and pain and destruction. When the creeps and the thugs ran from the burning town, they ran right into ambush points set up along the highway, then the troops of Six Battalion moved in to mop up anything that might be left alive . . . but not for long.

  Ben stood in the trashed library building of what had once been a small college in the town. He looked at the hundreds of ruined and rat-chewed books. He knelt down and picked up one rat-chewed volume of Durant’s eleven-volume Story of Civilization and carefully brushed away years of dust and neglect. “Anybody who would allow this to happen to a book deserves to be shot,” he muttered sourly.

  “I concur,” Dan said, looking around.

  Thermopolis walked in with some of his group. He looked around and shook his head in disgust. “They had the whole world at their fingertips . . . and refused to turn a page.”

  The hippie and his group began searching the library for volumes they could salvage.

  Ben pulled a map out of a pocket and studied it for a moment. “Corrie, order Five Battalion up and Six Battalion down; have them start cleaning out the Bremerton area. We’ll bivouac outside of town tonight and finish up Port Townsend in the morning.”

  “And that will just about do it for this state,” Tina remarked. “One more cleaned out.”

  By listening to radio transmissions, Lan Villar made certain that all Rebels were in the western section of the state and then he made his move. He ordered his people up and moved them quickly to the eastern side of California. He then moved them into Southern Oregon and began working his way north, keeping an entire state between his forces and the Rebels.

  Villar put scouts far out in front of his proposed route north. The short and very infrequent communications between the scouts and the main body were done in code and with jacked-up CBs.

  As Ben and his forces were beginning their move south, Villar and his bunch moved north. The two columns paralleled each other, a state apart.

  Ben headed his battalion down the extreme western edge of the state, working the towns that dotted the coastline while Cecil, West, Ike, Georgi, and Five and Six drove south out of the still-smoking Seattle area.

  “We’re clear,” Villar said with a sigh, removing a headset. “We’ve finally got them behind us, and, thank the gods of war, heading in the opposite direction.”

  “It’ll suit me just fine if I don’t never see Ben Raines again,” Satan said. “Just thinkin’ about that bastard gives me a headache.”

  Ashley glanced at the man, having serious doubts that the outlaw biker was even capable of thinking. But he kept that to himself. “We’ll be in Alaska in time to prepare for the winter. I would suggest we start stocking up on fuel oil and the like.”

  Villar shook his head. “From reports I’ve heard I don’t think there is much need for that. Supplies are more than adequate. What we have to do is go in looking like professionals; show the outlaws there a strong force . . . whether we are or not. We’ve got to go in with the upper hand and keep it. Our objective is still a thousand miles away, so we’ve got plenty of time to clean up our act.” And Villar also knew that the confidence of the men would grow with each mile they gained putting Ben Raines behind them. He stood up from the camp stool and adjusted his battle harness. “Let’s go take Alaska.”

  Ben’s forces crossed over into Oregon at Astoria. He would stay on 101 all the way down the state. Cecil and Ike entered through the rubble of Portland and would stay on the Interstate all the way down. Georgi and West moved east and picked up Highway 395 down, while Five and Six Battalions were ordered to wander the state.

  All units began reporting pockets of survivors as soon as they entered the state and Cecil and Ike found a huge concentration of Believers in Salem. All other units stopped where they were while Salem was being neutralized and destroyed.

  Five and Six Battalions set up an outpost at Madras and swept the zone, soon declaring it secure and requesting supplies be flown in.

  Ben had found a pocket of survivors on the coastline, in a small town named Garibaldi and was working to establish yet another secure zone. A few miles down the road, however, a band of thugs had set up shop and showed no signs of being intimidated by Ben Raines or anybody else.

  “He’s called Bull,” the leader of the survivors in Garibaldi told Ben. “And he’s a bad one. You’d be hardpressed to name a crime that he hasn’t committed and he’s proud of every vile thing he’s ever done. There are pockets of survivors all over Oregon, General Raines. But only the older, and by that I mean the more established groups, manage to survive.”

  Ben smiled. “What you’re saying is that you folks finally and totally rejected the liberal beliefs concerning the poor put-upon criminals that were jammed down our throats years back.”

  Ben’s smile was returned. “That is certainly one way of stating it, sir.”

  “We’ll deal with Mister Bullshit in the morning,” Ben told him. “Do you want to save the town he and his bunch have occupied?”

  “If at all possible. He’s massed a lot of materials that we could use.”

  “Materials such as?”

  “Medical supplies he found at an army base. Thousands of cases of MREs, clothing, weapons, and ammunition.”

  Ben held up a hand. “I get the point. We’ll take
the town intact.”

  “Fair-size little town,” Ben said after looking the town over through binoculars. “And they’ve done a bang-up job of setting up defensive position.”

  “They have a lot of military hardware,” Dan observed, casing his field glasses. “So we can bet they’ve also got Claymores planted around, as well.”

  “Let’s take it,” Ben said, glancing at his watch. Seven o’clock. “Corrie, send in the tanks and we’ll fall in behind them.”

  The main battle tanks began rumbling forward, Rebels on foot using them for cover. Heavy machine gun fire sprang up from the edges of the town, but the slugs could not penetrate the armor of the tanks. No mortar rounds fell from the town, and that brought a sigh of relief from all the Rebels, including Ben.

  The Rebels overran the outermost positions of the outlaws and dug into the just-vacated bunkers, establishing a well-defended front for themselves and forcing the outlaws to go on the offensive.

  Bull reviewed the situation and came to the conclusion he was in a piss-poor position. He’d been hearing about Ben Raines for more than a decade, but up until now had felt the man was more myth than reality.

  Until myth rolled up with fifty-five-ton battle tanks and practically stuck the snouts of the cannon up the asses of his men.

  And this was just one contingent of the Rebels, for Christ sake!

  “Get Raines on the radio,” he told a woman seated behind the equipment. “Him and me got to talk.”

  “What do you want, Bullshit?” Ben’s voice came out of the speaker.

  Bull ground his teeth together and fought to hold on to his temper. “A deal, Raines.”

  “I don’t make deals with crud.”

  “Well, what the hell do you intend to do with me and my people?”

  “I intend to kill you,” Ben said flatly, and a chill ran up and down Bull’s spine with the words.

  Bull knew then that everything he’d ever heard about Ben Raines was solid truth. Even before the Great War, Bull had been notorious up and down the West Coast, staying in trouble with the law. But he never had to spend more than a few weeks in jail for his infractions. A month at the most. The cops never could pin any of the rapes and assaults on him and Bull would walk out of the jail laughing.

  He always had money in his pocket to buy some shyster lawyer to get him off, and the judicial system was so screwed up back then that half the time he could plea-bargain out of a case with only a slap on the wrist.

  With a cold glob of fear in his belly, Bull knew those days were long gone and would never be back . . . not as long as Ben Raines ran the show.

  Bull lifted the mic. “No trial, no nothin?”

  “You got it, Bull,” Ben told him. “You’ve been tried, convicted, and sentenced in absentia.”

  “I know what that means and that ain’t legal!” Bull hollered.

  “Sue me.”

  “Well, come and get me then!” Bull screamed. “You cocky bastard!”

  “Oh, I plan on doing that, Bull. After lunch.”

  “Lunch! What kinda shitty war are you runnin’, anyways?”

  “Enjoy your last meal, Bull. Eagle out.”

  “Let’s get the hell outta here!” Bull said.

  “We cain’t,” one of his men told him, a mournful sound to the words. “Raines has done called for some more people to come in behind us. He’s got us in a box.”

  “How, for Christ sake?” Bull yelled. “We got all the streets blocked off.”

  “It’s another unit, I guess. They come up from the south early this morning, I reckon.”

  “What the hell are they doin’? They ain’t fired a round.”

  “They’re eatin’.”

  “Eatin’!”

  “Yeah. They’re sittin’ around their trucks and tanks and Jeeps eatin’ lunch. They don’t seen to be worried about nothin’.”

  “Bull,” another man asked. “How are we gonna get out of this mess? Ben Raines don’t fool with folks like us. He just puts ’em up agin a wall and that’s the end of it.”

  The radio operator started crying. “You said you’d take care of us, Bull.”

  Bull slapped her out of the chair. “Shut your damn mouth, bitch! We ain’t dead yet.”

  “No,” a man said. “I figure we got until lunch is over.”

  The look he received from Bull would fry eggs.

  The woman Bull had slapped to the floor jumped up and ran from the room, screaming curses at him. Bull stepped to the door, cocked a pistol, and shot her in the back. She fell to the ground, twitched once, and died.

  “Shit on you,” Bull muttered to the lifeless form. He walked back into the room and sat down while his men stared at him.

  Long bursts of heavy machine gun fire from both sides of the Rebel perimeters ripped the temporary quiet and somewhere in the town, a man screamed in pain.

  “Lunch must be over,” an outlaw said, absolutely no humor in his voice.

  EIGHTEEN

  The Rebels simply overwhelmed the outlaws by sheer numbers. Attacked from all sides, the outlaws died behind their guns, died screaming for mercy — their pleas falling on deaf ears — or were shot down as they tried to run away from the relentlessly charging Rebels.

  Bull sat on the ground, his hands tied behind his back, while Ben and a man from the now secure zone north of the outlaw town stood to one side.

  Another man from the secure zone was forming a noose out of heavy rope.

  “I ain’t believin’ this,” Bull said. “No trial, no jury, no chance to tell my story. You just gonna hang me!”

  “You can tell your story, Bull,” Ben told him. “But you’d better make it a condensed version; you don’t have much time.”

  Bull spat at Ben’s boots and cursed him until he was breathless.

  Ben glanced down at the clipboard in his hand and shook his head in disgust. “Says here you tortured animals to death as a kid, Bull.”

  “Yeah? So what?”

  “Did you?”

  “Yeah. What’s the big deal about that?”

  “Did your parents see that you got professional counseling after that?”

  Bull laughed. “Yeah. She was a good-lookin’ bitch, too. I raped her. Right there in her own office. You should have heard her squall when I bent her over the desk and shoved it up her butt.”

  “And because you were a juvenile you didn’t get any prison time for that.”

  “That’s right, Raines.”

  Ben looked at the man beside him. “We will never, ever, return to that form of judiciary nonsense. Anytime you start feeling sorry for scum like this” — he jerked a thumb toward Bull — “recall my words. Now hang him!”

  The Rebel push continued south, flushing out gangs of thugs and finding pockets of survivors all over the state. Almost always the survivors were in small groups, living far off the beaten path and maintaining a very low profile. And not all of them were thrilled to see the Rebels.

  There were those who had set up little cults, and the cult leaders were not happy when the Rebels came around. Others were filled with religious zealots, worshipping everything from a kumquat to a blank computer screen. Still others had reverted back to the caves, fleeing when the Rebels came around.

  “What are you going to do with these people, General?” Emil asked.

  “Leave them alone,” Ben told him. “I left you and your bunch alone, didn’t I?”

  “Yeah, but we never turned down any help you offered. I had more sense than that. What’s gonna happen when these people get really sick and need attention?”

  “I don’t know, Emil. All I can say is that they’ve chosen their life-style and they’re welcome to it. We’ve offered them help, they’ve turned it down, and that’s the end of the story as far as I’m concerned. As long as they pose no threat to us, they’re free to do as they damn well please.”

  “I tried to talk to some of them,” Emil said. “Tried to tell them I been where they are. Tried to tell them that soo
ner or later they’re gonna need our help, and they’re gonna be told to go sit on a candlestick. They said they didn’t care and to leave them alone.” He shrugged his shoulders. “What can you do?”

  “Nothing,” Ben said, knowing that Thermopolis was listening and a pretty good debate was sure to come out of this. “You all know that the government — back when there was a government — tried to take care of all the people; even the people who refused to step into the mainstream of society. I thought it was a mistake then, I think so now. I have no patience with people who chose totally different alternate life-styles and then when something goes wrong, expect the central government to help them. Piss on them!”

  The push southward was slow going, for the Rebels checked out every town and every building. They cut off the main highways and traveled the backroads to roads’ end. They missed nothing in their searches and they collected everything that might be of use. They offered help to anyone who would take it, but the help was not free, not without strings attached. You want help? You join us. You don’t want to join us, you’re on your own, pal.

  “You’re setting up a form of government,” Thermopolis finally geared up for debate, “that doesn’t leave the people any choice.”

  Ben poured them both coffee and waited.

  “You’re setting up a goddamned monarchy!”

  “I most certainly am not.”

  “You’re the absolute ruler. What the hell else do you call it?”

  “The people rule, Therm. You’re trying to split hairs. I’m asking for a little cooperation in return for help and protection, that’s all. You’re a fifty-year-old man with a ponytail, for Christ sake. Have I asked you to cut your hair? No, I have not and never will. You’re just as much an individual now as the day we first met.”

  “King Raines,” Thermopolis said with a smile.

  “You’re a fraud, Therm.”

  “Oh?”

  “You just don’t like — or profess not to like — any form of authority. But you can’t have organization without it. And you know it.”