Ben pretended to be asleep. But seeking fingers soon found a part of him that proved sleep to be impossible.
It began to rain the morning of the second day out, a slow, leaden dropping from the clouds, with thick pockets of fog lying heavy over the land. It only added to the desolation of the ravaged countryside. The rain and fog slowed the column down to no more than a crawl.
The Rebels saw no people. Not one living soul. And no animals. But they did find several carcasses of cows and pigs. Something had been eating on them, something with super strength and a fanged mouth.
“I didn’t know they had gorillas in this part of the country,” Gale said, shuddering at the sight of the mutilated animals.
“They don’t,” Ben said grimly. “Just mutants.”
“Thanks,” she replied. “I really needed that just after breakfast. If you want to call that slop we had breakfast.”
“C-rations.”
“What’s the C stand for: crap?”
“Get in the truck, Gale.”
“Whatever the master wishes.”
The column stopped at Thayer, in Missouri. The town was deserted. They slowly made their way to West Plains – also deserted. Willow Springs looked as though it had been torn apart by angry, petulant teenagers. With the scouts reporting back to them they felt as if eyes were on them.
“Don’t dismount!” Ben quickly radioed back. “Keep on rolling through the town. Get on through and wait for us a few miles northwest of there.”
Ben halted the convoy in Willow Springs. When he spoke to Gale, something in his voice told her not to argue with him.
“Stay here,” he told her. “And do not leave the truck unless and until I tell you to.”
She nodded.
Ben looked at her to see if she was feeling well.
Ben motioned for a team to begin moving up both sides of the street, weapons at combat ready. A thick, almost tangible odor hung over the small town. It resembled a scene from a grade B war movie: the sweaty faces of the troops; the hands clutching M-16s, AK-47s, CAR-15s and numerous other weapons of violence and death.
The thirty tanks in Ben’s column rumbled quietly on both ends of the town, their noise adding to the idling sounds of the APCs and self-propelled howitzers and heavy trucks.
“Shut them down!” Ben yelled. The order was relayed up and down the street.
The dead town suddenly grew silent, the ticking of cooling metal like out-of-sync clocks.
Ben walked the littered streets, his old Thompson at the ready, on full auto.
“Sinister,” Ben heard one young Rebel mutter, his voice rising above the heavy silence. “And eerie, to boot.”
“Possibly,” Ben replied, not turning his head toward the source of the words. “Steady now,” he called softly. “That smell is of mutants – and a lot of them. Fire only if fired upon. Let them make the hostile move. Pass the word.”
“There’s fresh crap here on the floor, General,” a sergeant called. “Not more than an hour old – if that old.”
“They’re here,” Ben said. “I can sense them. But they’re not running away, and they usually run at the sight of this many humans. Them not doing that bothers me.”
“They want me,” the small voice came from the top of what had once been a hardware store.
All heads looked up at the small figure, looking down at them. Even at that distance, she looked worn out.
“Who are you?” Ben called.
“Nancy Brinkerhoff. Sam Hartline tortured me, then ordered me taken to where the mutants gather. They stripped me naked and tied me to a tree, but I managed to get free. I’ve been running and hiding ever since. The mutants cornered me in this town. They’re all around here, hiding, watching, waiting.” There was a note of hysteria in her voice.
“Just calm down, miss,” Ben called. “You’re all right, now. You’re among friends. Let us handle the mutants. Come on down.”
“Who are you?” she called.
“Ben Raines.”
She began weeping and pointing.
The mutants erupted from the empty stores, screaming and howling in rage and hate. Many of them wielded sticks and clubs and crude spears, sharpened on one end. The stench of them was hideous, almost as much as their grotesque appearance was appalling to the stunned Rebels.
Ben was the first to react.
Leveling his Thompson, he pulled the trigger, holding it back. The stream of heavy .45-caliber slugs knocked the front line of mutants sprawling, blood and hair and bits of bone and guts and brain splattered against the brick of the buildings.
The Rebels reacted just a split-second after Ben fired. The fire-fight was very short, with only one Rebel wounded. He took a spear in his leg. Dead and dying mutants littered the sidewalk and street. Blood pumped from their deformed bodies and leaked into the gutters, clogged from years of leaves and rags.
“Let them rot,” Ben ordered the Rebels, his voice strong in the shocked silence that always follows heavy gunfire. “Get Miss Brinkerhoff and let’s get the hell out of here.”
The brigade was stopped for the night in Cabool, Missouri, some sixteen miles northwest of Willow Springs. Nancy had been bathed and fed and dressed in clean clothing; Doctor Chase had examined her and cleaned and bandaged her cuts. She told her story.
She spoke of what Sam Hartline and his men had done to her. She was blunt, leaving nothing out.
“Those people are perverted beyond imagination,” she said. “I suppose I’m – was – very naive. But I can assure you – all of you – that was tortured out of me.”
“Where are you from?” Ben asked.
“Chicago, originally,” Nancy said. The marks of torture were still very evident on her face and arms. “But my family pulled out of there just after the bombings of 1988.” She looked square at Ben. “You know why, General?”
“Yes,” Ben said, “I know only too well. My brother was a part of that . . . madness.”
“You later killed your brother, did you not, General?” she asked.
“Yes,” Ben said softly, “I did. Back in Tri-States.”
How hated Ben’s system of government was did not come home to the people of the three states until late fall of the first year. Ben had stepped outside of his home for a breath of the cold, clean air of night. Juno went with him, and together they walked from the house around to the front yard. When Juno growled low in his throat, Ben went into a crouch, and that saved his life. Automatic-weapon fire spider-webbed the windshield of his pickup, the slugs hitting and ricocheting off the metal, sparking the night. Ben jerked open the door of the truck, punched open the glove box, and grabbed a pistol. He fired at a dark figure running across the yard, then at another. Both went down, screaming in pain.
A man stepped from the shadows of the house and opened fire just as Ben hit the ground. Lights were popping on up and down the street, men with rifles in their hands appearing on the lawns.
Ben rose to one knee and felt a slug slam into his hip, knocking him to one side, spinning him around, the lead traveling down his leg, exiting just above his knee. He pulled himself up and leveled the 9mm, pumping three rounds into the dark shape by the side of the house. The man went down, the rifle dropping from his hands.
Ben pulled himself up, his leg and hip throbbing from the shock of the wounds. He leaned against the truck just as help reached him.
“Call the medics!” a neighbor shouted. “Governor’s been hit.”
“Help me over to that man,” Ben said. “He looks familiar.”
Standing over the fallen man, Ben could see where his shots had gone: two in the stomach, one in the chest. The man was blood-splattered and dying. He coughed and spat at Ben.
“Goddamned nigger-lovin’ scum,” the dying man said. He closed his eyes, shivering in the convulsions of pain; then he died.
“God, Governor!” a man asked, “who is he?”
Salina came to Ben, putting her arms around him as the wailing of ambulances gr
ew louder. “Do you know him, Ben?” she asked.
“I used to,” Ben’s reply was sad. “He was my brother.”
“That’s horrible, Ben,” Gale said. “Your own brother hated you enough to want to kill you?”
“He was part of Jeb Fargo’s Nazi establishment outside of Chicago,” Ben explained. “To this day, I don’t know why or how he changed so radically in his thinking.” He looked at Nancy. “You want to continue?”
“Yes,” she said. “My father took us – my mother, my sister, my brother – and went west, into Iowa. We settled in Waterloo. We survived,” she said it flatly. “But it sure wasn’t any fun doing so. Never enough to eat, cold and tired most of the time that first year or so. But it gradually got better as things began to settle down. My mother died in ’93, my father died a year later. My older sister raised my brother and me. We lived through Logan’s . . . reign in office. My older sister always talked about heading out to Tri-States, but somehow we never did get around to doing that. Then Tri-States fell and after that the country seemed to fall apart. I was seventeen when . . . the troops invaded Tri-States.
“We got through the horror of Al Cody and VP Lowry and all that . . . awfulness, all the hate and the discontent. Somehow.
“One day my sister and my brother went out to look for food. I was sick and they didn’t want me to go ’cause the weather was bad and I was just beginning to get better. I had pneumonia.” She sighed. “That was last year. They never came back. Then one day the rats came. I never saw anything – up to that point – so . . . so horrible in all my life. And I thought after having lived through the bombings and the roaming gangs of thugs and all that, I could handle anything. I must have a mental block about the rats, because I really can’t recall much about them. I know I panicked. I ran. I ran blindly. I don’t know how I survived, but I did. In a manner of speaking.”
Tears ran down the young woman’s face and Gale reached out to take her hand and hold it.
“I can’t ever have children. The IPF doctors . . . gave me a shot. Me, and hundreds – maybe thousands – of other women, and men, too. Orientals, Hispanics, blacks, Jews, Indians.” She wiped her eyes and shook her head. “There is some sort of armed resistance movement north of Interstate 70, General. That was why they were torturing me. Or so they said. I think those people just like to torture people. I know they do. I heard some of them say so. I saw . . . I saw several of the men masturbating while they watched me being tortured. They . . . they would stand in front of me, where I was strapped down, and . . . ejaculate in my face.”
When Gale looked at Ben, the rage of five thousand years was printed invisibly across her face. It seemed to say: Five thousand years of persecution is enough. This time, stop it forever.
“All right,” Ben said.
The other men and women gathered around looked at each other in confusion, not understanding what had just silently transpired between the man and woman.
Ben swung his eyes from Gale, returning them to Nancy as he saw her rub her arm. His arm picked up the numbers tattooed on her forearm.
J-1107.
“The J stands for Jew?” Gale asked, a husky quality to her voice.
“Yes,” Nancy replied. “B for black. O for Oriental. H for Hispanic. I for Indian. M for mental defective. I’ve seen other letters but I don’t know what they represent.”
Ben felt sick to his stomach.
Gale was silently weeping.
Ben looked around at the silent circle, more than one man had tears in his eyes.
Nancy resumed her horror story. “Sam Hartline and his men took me, tried to make me tell what I knew about the resistance movement. But I didn’t – still don’t – know anything about it, other than that it exists. They ... really had a good time with me,” she said, keeping her eyes downcast. “I ... don’t know how many times they raped me or how many men. And women. The women would strap ... would strap huge penises on and ... rape me. There is something terribly perverted about many of those people – maybe all of them. I was raped in every way possible. Over and over. It got so I could sometimes block it out.
“They beat me, shocked me. They attached wires to my breasts and my ... my genital area. The voltage was never strong enough to knock me out. It just hurt so bad. They forced objects up my ... you know. I know they are doing some kind of experimental medical work up there in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Like the Nazis used to do way back then. But I don’t know what kind of experiments. Something to do with the mutants, I think. Mutants and humans.
“They kept questioning me, but I think they knew I was telling the truth. They just wanted to see how much I could take. I guess I’m stronger than I thought. What could I tell them? I didn’t know anything. I think I would have told them anything. Anything to stop the pain and the humiliation. The pain.” She shook her head.
Nancy held up her left hand. All her fingernails were gone.
“I’m not a coward, but a human being has limits,” she said. “They finally stopped. Just quit. I thought I was dreaming. Maybe dead. I didn’t know a person could hurt so much in so many places. I don’t even remember the ride down to Missouri. When I woke up tied to that tree, I was naked and cold and hungry and sick. They left me with a little reminder of them. The men, I mean. They had attached a dog collar around my neck and defecated on me.”
Ben was then conscious of a pain in his right hand. He had clenched his fingers into a tight fist.
“I managed to get loose from the tree and found an old farmhouse and cleaned up. I wrapped up in an old quilt and walked down the road until I came to another house. I found some old clothes there. I found a gun and some bullets on a dead man and taught myself how to shoot the thing. I’m not very good at it, but I sure scared the shit out of some mutants, I know that. I hit a couple of them. Then they began tracking me.”
She lifted her eyes, looking at Ben. “They – the mutants – have some kind of intelligence, and some sort of communications system. They have to have that, because they were always one jump ahead of me.”
“Interesting,” Doctor Chase said. “That confirms what I thought all along.”
“And that is?” Ben glanced at him.
“The mutants have leaders, pack leaders, den leaders, if you will, who possess more intelligence than the others. And they have organized them; they have their own form of pecking order.”
“And the males like human women,” Gale added.
“How ghastly,” Colonel Gray remarked. “I believe I could have gotten on quite well without that knowledge.”
“And me,” Gale said. “Gross!”
“Best to know the type of enemy we are facing,” the doctor said. “And it appears we have more than one enemy.”
Chase did not look or act his age. His wife, a woman forty years his junior, could well attest to that. She had just borne him a child.
“What can you tell us about the IPF, Nancy?” Ben asked.
“Not a whole lot,” she admitted. “But I did hear the men talking some when they weren’t torturing me. Something about some new people coming in from Iceland. I kept fading in and out, but I think – no, I’m sure – they said several battalions.” She looked at Ben. “Does that help any?”
His smile held no humor. “Well, yes and no, Nancy. I don’t know the size of their battalions, but we’ll call it twenty-five hundred personnel per battalion. Let’s call several three. That would mean we now have approximately seventy-five hundred more troops to contend with.”
“My Lord,” Colonel Gray said after a soft whistle of alarm.
“Yeah,” Ben said. “I hope He is on our side in this upcoming fight.”
“We’ve been thinking that for five thousand or more years,” Gale said. “Believe me, sometimes I have serious reservations.”
“Let’s not tempt fate by becoming sacrilegious at this stage of the game,” Ben said.
“For the first time in a long time,” Nancy said, “I feel a little bit of hope for the
future. I feel like I’ve found a home.”
“Right.” Gale once more took her hand. “Believe me, I need all the help I can get with this bunch of schlubs.”
“Ben,” Doctor Chase said, “have you ever considered taking a hickory stick to her tush?” He jerked a thumb toward Gale.
Gale glared at him. “I didn’t know you had turned to wife-beating, Lamar.”
“Only when she needs it, baby.” Chase grinned at her.
Nancy laughed at this exchange, her first laugh in weeks.
Ben patted her gently on the shoulder. “You’re safe, now, Nancy.”
“Yes,” the young woman said. “But I keep thinking about all those poor people north of here who are anything but safe.”
“We’re going to do our best to stop the Russians,” Ben told her.
“I really hope God is on our side,” Nancy spoke to no one in particular. “I really, really do.”
TWELVE
The column covered only seventy-five miles the next day due to numerous equipment breakdowns and the worsening condition of the roads. The terrible roads contributed to the mechanical problems. The mechanics stayed busy, cussing as they worked frantically, for they realized they had no time to waste. Each hour meant someone in the IPF-controlled areas was being tortured and killed.
Before limping into Rolla, Ben told Colonel Gray, “Take a full platoon in there, Dan. If you find any of the IPF or any civilian who has tossed in with them – kill them.”
The Englishman smiled coldly and knowingly, saluted and pulled out. The ex-British SAS officer was one of the most savage fighters in Ben’s command.
The first thing Colonel Gray observed just outside of Rolla was the body of a black man. He had been hanged by the neck and his features were horribly disfigured. A crudely lettered cardboard sign was hanging about his neck: “NIGGERS – STAY IN YOUR PLACE.”
Sgt. Mac Cummings, a young black, swallowed audibly. “My momma used to tell me they’d be days like this, but she didn’t tell me they was goin’ to come in bunches.”
Anarchy in the Ashes Page 17
