After the group had left, Jersey said, “Where are all these damn people coming from? Where have they been hiding for all these years? What have they been doing all the years since the Great War?”
“Waiting for us to do their dirty work, Jersey,” Ben said. “It’s typical of a certain type of mealymouthed liberal. They knew if they stuck their heads out of their holes, the thugs and street slime and creepies and outlaws would have them for lunch. So they waited while we did all the work—and they knew we were doing it. That’s what pisses me off about that bunch. Blanton admitted it. They knew all along we were killing punks and thugs. They knew we weren’t cutting any of them any slack. And they let us do it. But now, oh boy, but now . . . this is the last great gathering of slime in the Northern Hemisphere. The liberals are safe now, for a time. Now the liberals can come out of hiding and strut around puffing out their chests and weeping and pissing and moaning about how harshly we’re treating the poor unfortunate criminal element.” Ben smiled. “But their safety will be a very fleeting thing as we keep shoving more and more punks across our borders into their territory. They’re going to open their eyes one morning and find they’re right back where they were before the Great War: smack in the middle of a growing epidemic of lawlessness. And I am going to be very amused when that takes place.”
Ben stood silent for a moment, leaning against a porch support post, listening to the steady rolling thunder of artillery. “Very amused.”
The pounding of the artillery did little to harm the Night People, for they were bunkered deep underground, with dozens of exit holes once the barrage stopped—if they chose to exit and face the wrath of the Rebels.
However, things were not going nearly so well for the gangs in the city. They had stored provisions for a long siege. They had plenty of food and water and ammo and bedding and medical supplies. But they hadn’t counted on the Rebels destroying the city; didn’t take into consideration that the Rebels might lay back several miles and bring the concrete and steel crashing down on their heads.
They should have asked the creepies about the ruthlessness of Ben Raines.
As far as actual physical casualties, the gangs fared pretty well; it was the psychological aspect of the barrage that was taking a heavy toll on the criminal element in the city. Nothing is more mentally debilitating than a steady artillery barrage, for there is no place to run to escape it. After a time many break under the strain and are reduced to babbling, slobbering idiots. Others run headlong into the streets, to be crushed and killed by falling debris or shrapnel from the rounds. Others seek shelter in basements of buildings and are forever trapped by tons of concrete and steel, entombing them for eternity. A few stick the muzzles of their weapons into their mouths and end it. Pretty extreme, but it works.
A few minutes before dusk of the first day of the bombardment, Ms. Three-Last-Names came to see Ben.
“Here comes that woman who isn’t real sure who she is,” Jersey said. “And that jerk who represents Timmy Farter is with her.”
“Narter,” Ben corrected.
“Whatever.”
“I remember reading something about him,” Cooper said. “But I can’t recall whether it was good or bad.”
“Don’t get me started,” Ben said.
“I think he drank a lot of beer,” Corrie said.
“That was his brother,” Ben said. “That’s the one we should have elected.”
“Hey!” Cooper said, standing up. “A whole mob is right behind those two flakes. It’s the press.”
“Shit!” Ben said. “That’s all we need. How in the hell did they learn of this operation?”
“Three guesses,” Jersey said sourly.
“The Red Cross is with them, too,” Beth said.
“I hope they brought some doughnuts,” Ben muttered.
“General Raines,” Ralph Galton said. “I have been asked to be the spokesperson for this group.”
“So speak.”
“We wish permission to enter the war zone.”
“You know where it is. It’s kind of hard to miss, I would say.”
“Yeah, we’ve been pretty accurate so far,” Jersey said with a smile.
“This is no time for levity, General,” Ralph said, after giving Jersey a dirty look. “There are wounded in that city who need to be evacuated for medical treatment.”
Ben looked at the group. All in their early to mid thirties. The new breed of liberal, he thought. All earnest and forthright. Earnest and forthright . . . sounded like a vaudeville team.
“Well?” Ms. Three-Last-Names demanded.
“Well . . . what?” Ben asked.
“Do we have your permission to enter the city?”
“Sure. Go right ahead. Don’t let me stop you.”
“When may we assume the bombardment will cease?” Ralph asked.
“At 0700 hours tomorrow.”
“My God!” another earnest and forthright person said, standing with several cameras hanging off his person. He was wearing a jacket that appeared to have about eighty pockets. “That’s thirteen hours away.”
“Congratulations on your ability to tell time,” Ben replied.
“That’s a neat jacket,” Beth said. “Where’d you get it?”
“If you don’t mind,” the young man said to her. “General, we demand to be allowed to enter the city.”
“I told you, go right ahead. None of my people will stop you.” Ben smiled. “As a matter of fact, I’ll even open a corridor for you.” He opened his map case, which he had been studying until the light began to fade, and used a penlight to look at it. “Corrie, order batteries 17, 18, and 19 to cease firing at—” he looked at his watch “—1830 hours. They will not resume until 1900. Tell Batts 4, 21, and 14 to cover that corridor; these people are to be allowed in, but no one is allowed out.”
“Right, sir.”
“Well, now,” Eighty-Pockets said smugly, “the power of the press is alive and well.”
“Not for long,” Jersey muttered under her breath. She knew perfectly well what Ben was doing.
“Well, let’s be off!” Ms. Three-Last-Names said.
“You sure are,” Beth muttered.
The representatives from the Red Cross hesitated; they were not nearly so full of themselves as the press corps and the men and women from the offices of Blanton and Narter.
In their rush to get into the smoking city and report all the atrocities committed upon the poor misunderstood and much-maligned punks and thugs and street slime by Ben Raines and his horrible, nasty, right-wing Republican army, the others left the Red Cross behind.
“You opened a corridor to let them in, General Raines,” a very attractive lady said. “But when will you reopen the corridor to let them out?”
Ben smiled. “At 0700 hours tomorrow.”
SEVEN
The press and the nosy liberals (not that there is a modicum of difference between the two) made it safely into the smoking and burning city. They were positively aghast at the devastation. When they finally stopped their vehicles, they realized the Red Cross people were missing.
“Hell with them,” a reporter said. “I didn’t like them anyway. I don’t trust them. They probably secretly support Ben Raines. They’re holdovers from before the Great War. Old-timers. I heard one say he voted for George Bush. My God, who would willingly admit that?”
They were all still reasonably young, but had managed to get quite a liberal education before the Great War knocked the world to its knees, and had been living (groveling) at the feet of people like Blanton and Narter and their ilk ever since.
Because they had lived through the Great War and the bloody aftermath, the sight of bodies did not disturb them all that much. But since reporters were present, with cameras rolling and clicking (more clicking than rolling, for while many newspapers were coming off the presses across the nation, TV stations were rare in the still-recovering nation), they did occasionally manage a tear and a sniffle for effect.
>
“I wonder where everybody is?” Eighty-Pockets asked, glancing at his watch. It was 1900 hours. He looked up into the rapidly darkening sky. “What is that noise?”
“Incoming!” an older reporter yelled. “That bastard Raines has resumed the shelling.”
“Head for that building over there!” Ms. Smith-Harrelson-Ingalls shouted, pointing.
The group took off at a flat lope, heading for what they hoped would be safety. Eyes watched them approach. Cruel, greedy, and hungry eyes.
The Red Cross representatives stayed for supper at Ben’s suggestion. They were surprised to find that Ben ate the same thing his troops ate, and consequently, so did they. During dinner the lone woman in the group of four said, “That was a very unkind thing you did, General.”
“And what is that, Ms. Petti?”
“It’s Julie, General. And you can drop the Ms. business. I never cared for it back when the nation was whole. Sending those press people in the city knowing they would be trapped.”
“That’s their problem.”
Julie Petti, Ben guessed, was in her late thirties or early forties, and aging very well considering what the nation had gone through over the past decade.
“Where have you people been hiding over the years, Julie?”
“In very small groups all over the nation, General—”
“Ben. Call me Ben.”
“Ben. All right. Speaking quite frankly, none of us knew what you and your forces were up to. The underground government put out so many stories about you and your Rebels, we didn’t know what to think.”
“I have no difficulty accepting that,” Ben said.
Julie looked at Ben with amusement in her hazel eyes. She brushed back a lock of dark brown hair from her forehead. “You will have to admit that your form of government is, ah, quite novel.”
“It works for us,” Ben said. “Now several more states in the Lower Forty-Eight have joined us. The entire eastern section of Canada is on board with us, and I suspect that before it’s over, most of Canada will join us. Liberalism is dead, Julie. It doesn’t work and never has. Many Americans knew that before the Great War and wanted change, but the liberal Democratic party blocked our every move. Now we’re too strong for them to stop, and it scares them to death.”
Julie listened to the roar of the big guns for a few seconds. “How much of the city is going to be standing after that stops?”
“More than you think,” Ben told her. “And casualties won’t be as heavy as you might imagine. We’ll start entering the city at 0701.” He smiled. “You folks want to come along?”
“That’s why we’re here,” one of the men in the group said.
It seemed to the victims that the rape and sodomy and degradation would never stop. Ms. Smith-Harrelson-Ingalls—along with the other women in the group—had been passed from punk to punk so many times they lost count of the number of men who raped them. Ralph Galton had gotten very indignant and quite lippy, at first. That stopped when he was bent over a table and repeatedly buggered. Another man was forced to have oral sex with his captors.
“But we’re here to help you!” Ms. Smith-Harrelson-Ingalls cried. “We love you!”
“Yeah?” Tony Green, a.k.a. Big Stomper, said. “Well, we love your ass, Ms. Big Tits. Like, literally, baby.”
Ms. Smith-Harrelson-Ingalls began screaming as Big Stomper sodomized her. Her cries were lost in the thunder of the artillery barrage.
Later, when the punks had sexually exhausted themselves, Ms. Smith-Harrelson-Ingalls heard one of Big Stomper’s lieutenants ask, “Do we take them to the Night People?”
“Naw,” Tony said. “They’re bunkered in underground. No way to get to them.”
“Wanna give them to the niggers?”
“Hell, no! Just burn all their clothes and leave them here. We gotta get ready to fight.” He looked at Ralph Galton, huddled naked in a pain-filled ball on the dirty floor. “But first I’m gonna teach that big-mouth over there a lesson.” Tony then proceeded to show the others why he was called Big Stomper. He stomped Ralph Galton to death.
The punks then vanished into the explosive night.
Gina Zapp found a rag and began wiping the blood from her thighs. “Nice people,” she said sarcastically. “Really worth saving.” She looked over at Eighty-Pockets, who was sobbing in a corner of the darkened room. Eighty-Pockets had taken several dicks up the ass. “Oh, stop your whimpering, Greg! Women get sodomized all the time, and you men sit on juries and won’t convict. So just shut up!”
“Look around for some rags or cardboard to cover ourselves with,” a man said.
“And something to defend ourselves with,” Ms. Smith-Harrelson-Ingalls said, a hard note in her voice. “Clubs or bricks or boards or something. I’m going to bash that son of a bitch’s brains out if he comes back here.”
“Has anybody got any mouthwash?” another reporter asked.
Ben entered the eastern edge of the city just behind the first wave at 0730. Georgi’s people were pushing in from the north, and Ike was advancing from the west.
“Recon’s found the group who went in last night, General,” Corrie said.
“Alive?”
“Oh, yeah. Some punks grabbed them and raped them—men and women. Two blocks ahead, on the left.”
A angry group of reporters and human rights representatives met Ben. They were dressed in a mishmash of spare Rebel clothing from the Rebel’s packs.
“I want you to find that goddamn Tony Green, General Raines,” Ms. Smith-Harrelson-Ingalls squalled in Ben’s face. “I want you to castrate that slimy son of bitch with a dull knife and then shoot him!”
“I was under the impression that you didn’t believe in capital punishment,” Ben said. “Did something happen to change your mind?”
Julie Petti stood off to one side and listened to the exchange.
The blood drained from the woman’s face and she glared daggers at Ben. “Fuck you!” Ms. Smith-Harrelson-Ingalls said, then marched off toward a waiting team of medics.
Ben glanced at Nick Stafford, sitting in a Hummer, looking at him. “I haven’t started going to church, so don’t worry about that. And I’ve abused too many women in my life to tell you that you should have been a bit more understanding with her, Ben,” Nick said. “But I will anyway.” Nick put the Hummer in gear and drove on down the debris-littered street.
Ben looked at Julie Petti, who was watching him. “You have anything to say about it?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “What rape does to a woman is something that men will never fully understand, Ben.”
“Perhaps I was a bit cold, at that. But she had no business coming in here unarmed. But then, you were coming in here unarmed, weren’t you?”
Julie and the men with her smiled. The men opened their jackets, showing Ben their sidearms nestled in shoulder holsters. Julie reached into her purse and hauled a big 9-mm Beretta, model 92S.
Ben said, “Those would have helped . . . but not much.” The Red Cross people had told him at supper the night before that this was their first real outing since the Great War. Mostly they had been helping provide food and medical care to civilian survivors, not criminals.
“Got a real firefight shaping up about four blocks ahead,” Corrie said.
Ben outran the others in getting to the Hummer.
Rebels halted the HumVee a block from the sounds of very heavy gunfire. “No vehicles past this point, General. We’ve got at least a thousand punks stretched out along a five or six block line, and at least that deep. They’re dug in hard, and they’re well armed. Machine guns, rocket launchers, and mortars.”
“Park over there, Coop,” Ben said, getting out of the Hummer. He looked back at the Red Cross vehicle. “Stay here,” he told them. “Come on, gang.”
The Rebel MP had the authority to stop any vehicle from passing his checkpoint, but he sure as hell wasn’t about to tell the general he couldn’t proceed on foot.
Lieutenant
Bonelli was frantically waving people forward, several of them carrying M-60 machine guns and ammo cans. They were trying to keep up with Ben and his team.
Exasperated, Lieutenant Bonelli finally yelled, “Goddamnit, General, slow down!”
Ben grinned and ducked into an old apartment building, his team right behind him.
Two blocks away Julie was watching through binoculars. “Does he do this often?” she asked a Rebel sergeant. “My God! That’s the commanding general of the entire army!”
“As often as he can, miss. Nobody has yet figured out a way to keep him from it.”
“Incredible,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Ben could hear the rattle of machine-gun fire coming from the room directly above him. He could hear the clink of expended brass bouncing off the floor. Ben pointed toward a door and Cooper nodded. He pointed toward another door and Beth nodded and got into position, covering it. Ben walked around the room until he was certain he was directly under the machine-gun crew. He lifted the Thompson and perforated the ceiling with .45-caliber slugs. The firing abruptly ceased, and the sounds of badly wounded bodies flopping on the floor was clear. Dust rained down on those on the ground floor, just as drops of blood began leaking through several of the holes.
The sound of a heavy metal object bouncing down the stairs was loud.
“Grenade!” Ben said.
Cooper reached out and slammed the door closed and hit the floor with the others just as the grenade blew. The door disintegrated, blowing splinters and bits of paneling all over the ground-floor room.
“That was unkind of them,” Beth said, just as Cooper stuck the muzzle of his M-16 around the door jamb and gave the second floor landing a full clip. There was a scream of pain, and a body came rolling down the steps to sprawl dead at Cooper’s feet.
D-Day in the Ashes Page 6
