Valor in the Ashes

by William W. Johnstone

  Monte was astonished. He stuttered for a moment. “You can’t do stuff like that! That’s against the law. Criminals got rights, too, man!”

  “I can’t get through to you, Monte. Rebels don’t think like other people. And Ben Raines is not going to make any deals with outlaws or warlords. For us, this city is do or die. That’s the name of the game.”

  “Ben Raines has gotta go,” Monte said. “Can’t nobody live in a society like Ben Raines wants.”

  “A lot of people did, Monte. And made it work. The old system, back before the war, was breaking down . . .”

  Monte grinned. “Damn sure was!”

  “. . . Ben Raines and his people set up a new system — a curious mixture of compassion and hardness. It was unique, had never before been attempted. And slowly but surely, he’s setting it up again.”

  “Over my dead body!”

  “Yes,” Ashley said dryly. “That is his plan.”

  Ben had spoken with all his commanders. They all agreed that the holding plan was confusing the creepies; but to a person, they wondered for how long. And what would the creepies come up with to counter it? And when?

  Then Ben said the words that chilled them all. “They’ll probably force us to come into the subways and tunnels after them.”

  Rebet was the first to speak over the radio hookup that linked all commanders by translators. “That is not something I would look forward to doing.”

  “Nor do I,” Ben admitted. “But if I were in their shoes, that’s what I would do.”

  Ike looked out the window of his CP in lower Manhattan. “I think we’re going to get some rest this evening, Ben.”

  “How do you figure, Ike?”

  “The way it’s snowing outside, those black-robed creeps would stand out like black candles on white icing.”

  “I have a suspicion they’ll change into white robes, Ike. Don’t put anything past these bastards.”

  The temperature stayed right at the thirty-degree mark, and the snow came down in thick wet flakes. Soon the entire city was blanketed in white, and the snow showed no signs of letting up anytime soon.

  Ben gave the orders by translator: “Dig in and brace yourselves to get hit hard. I’ve got a hunch they’re going to throw everything they’ve got at us tonight. Double your ammo on hand and lay in extra rations. Everybody draw a pocket stove and plenty of fuel tabs for hot coffee or tea. Layer your clothing and be sure you have extra socks. Hang tough, people.”

  Ben felt eyes on him and turned. Jerre was looking at him.

  “Are we going to have another night like last night, Ben?”

  “Worse.”

  “My God, Ben, how many of these . . . creatures are we fighting? It seems like we killed hundreds last night.”

  “Less than two hundred was the final tally. Our team racked up more points than any other. How many, Jerre? I don’t know. A conservative guess would be thirty, forty thousand. It’s probably double that.”

  “Or more.”

  “Or more.”

  She stepped forward and stuck out her hand. “Let’s be friends, Ben. Bury the hatchet.”

  He took her hand. “We’ll bury the hatchet, Jerre. But don’t expect me to be your friend. The waters between us run too deep. Friendship is something I won’t settle for.”

  She dropped her hand. “Perhaps that’s all there is, Ben.”

  “Then so be it. How’s your ankle?”

  “Getting better. Why?”

  “Because just as soon as Chase says you’re ready for the line, I’m transferring you back to Tina’s command.”

  Hurt came into her eyes. “I suppose I understand.”

  “Neither one of us can help the way we feel, Jerre. Call it a cruel trick of fate. That’s as good as anything, I guess.”

  They stood gazing into each other’s eyes for a moment. Jerre blinked first.

  “Take your position downstairs, Jerre.”

  “Yes, sir — Dad!”

  Ben’s smile was very thin.

  When she had left the room, her back very straight, Ben checked his M-14 and his Thompson. Cooper had carried the ammo boxes downstairs. Ben slipped into his field jacket and buckled his battle harness on. He reclipped his grenades and slung the M-14, hand-carrying his Thompson. He glanced out the window. About an hour’s daylight left and the snow was coming down just as hard as when it began.

  Ben had a very bad feeling about this approaching night.

  He cut off the battery-powered lights and walked downstairs to what had once been a neighborhood grocery store. He looked out the open space where the window had once been, checking his perimeter for that night’s upcoming fight. Clear.

  Cooper lay behind an M-60, already in position. Ammo boxes were stacked beside him. Jersey lay beside him, all bundled up against the cold. Ben slipped on his face protector. The others already had theirs on.

  “Eat now,” Ben ordered. “Whether you’re hungry or not. The cold will sap you before you know it. You might not get another chance to eat for hours.”

  He leaned his M-14 against the wall and sat down on a box, opening a packet of cold rations. Off to his left, a portable stove had been fired up, heating coffee. There was almost no wind, and that would help combat the cold. Ben guessed the temperature right at 30 degrees.

  After eating, he put on a headset and listened to what radio chatter there was. Changing frequencies, he monitored the troops down south. Everyone appeared to be in place and ready.

  Ben poured a cup of the chicory-laced coffee and leaned against the wall, keeping well back from the open front of the building. Dressed as they were, in dark battle dress, until his people opened fire, they were as difficult to detect as the night people would be — providing the creepies did dress in white to blend in with the snow — for Ben had ordered no lights and no smoking, and until the attack began, as little moving around and talking as possible, for movement will give away a position as quickly as conversation.

  Just as dusk began to settle quietly over the city, Jersey softly whispered, “In the alley about ten o’clock. They’re dressed in white, just like you said, General.”

  Cooper swung the M-60.

  “Hold your fire,” Ben whispered. “Let’s see what they’re up to.”

  “Creepies to our left, about three o’clock,” Jerre whispered.

  Ben cut his eyes. He could detect no movement, but he could see a hump in the gathering snow that had not been there before. He lifted his walkie-talkie. “Dan, put a rocket into that alley a couple of points to the right of our position. As soon as he fires, Jerre, put some rounds in that hump in the snow.”

  The whooshing sound of a rocket launcher being triggered was immediately followed by a wall of flame erupting from the alley. Several uglies were blown out of the alley and one staggered out, his white robe blazing.

  Jerre put a three-round burst into the hump in the snow. The hump lifted upward, the snow staining red, then fell back to the street and did not move.

  Another rocket was fired into the alley, the 81mm rocket finishing any night crawlers who might have survived the initial blast.

  Ben had knelt down, presenting a low profile, but still able to see what was going on.

  From the building across the street, a creepie returned the rocket fire, the rocket smacking into the floor just above Ben’s position, momentarily blinding those on the ground level with dust and smoke.

  But Cooper had already spotted the location of the ugly and began spraying the area with M-60 fire.

  Ben cursed. They had just cleared that building hours earlier. The night crawlers had more hidey-holes than a field full of rabbits.

  His eyes detected movement, and Ben hit the floor just as automatic weapons fire sprayed their location from a window on the second floor across the street. Beth, Jersey, and Jerre all fired at the muzzle flashes. An AK fell to the snow-covered sidewalk.

  “Clear that floor, Dan,” Ben spoke into the cup of his walkie-talkie.


  Big Thumpers and rocket launchers began pounding the second floor. Flames soon consumed the floor, licking up the dry walls and dancing out of the shattered windows. Creepies began running out of the ground level, to be chopped down by Rebel fire.

  No more enemy fire came toward Ben’s position. The burning building threw waves of heat at the cold Rebels across the street. “Something good came out of it,” Ben muttered.

  “Dan reporting no dead or wounded among his people,” Beth said.

  “Tell him we’re OK here.”

  The old building went up quickly, the flames soon spreading to another building, but not moving across the alley to torch that structure.

  Darkness touched the city as the snow kept up its steady fall.

  Nothing that the Rebels could detect made itself visible on the city’s streets during the long hours of early evening. Was the short attack all that was coming at them this night?

  Ben doubted it; that nagging feeling he’d experienced about the night being a bad one was still with him.

  “General,” Beth broke into his thoughts. Ben cut his eyes to her. “The creepies are making the prisoners, naked men and women and children, march in front of them as they advance toward Ike and Cecil’s positions.”

  “Here, too,” Jerre’s voice was tense.

  Ben turned, then followed her pointing finger up the street. There was just enough light for him to make out the pale white bodies of the prisoners, shuffling and crying and shivering in the cold as they advanced toward Ben’s position.

  Ben lifted his walkie-talkie. “See them, Dan?”

  “I see them, and I can see where they have prisoners all mixed up among their ranks.”

  “Buddy is calling in the same reports, General,” Beth told him.

  Thermopolis radioed in by walkie-talkie. Same thing was taking place in his sector. Emil’s report came right on the heels of Thermopolis. Emil’s report differed only in that the man used a great deal of profanity in tracing the ancestry of the night crawlers.

  Ben was conscious of eyes searching his face; everyone in the store was looking at him.

  “Put your eyes back on your perimeter, people,” he ordered.

  “They’re getting close to all positions, General,” Beth said. “Commanders need orders, sir — now!”

  “Order everyone into gas masks. Everyone start lobbing in tear gas and smoke grenades. Now!”

  The cold snowy air soon became filled with smoke and tear gas.

  Ben laid down his Thompson. “Order them out, Beth. Pistols and knives for close combat. Go!”

  Ben was out in the street before the echo of his words had faded.

  EIGHTEEN

  The charge of the Rebels, some armed with pistols and knives, others with pistols and camp axes, took the uglies by surprise. And that one or two seconds that they hesitated cost them dearly. For wars are not won by hesitation; the bones of hundreds of thousands who hesitated lie decaying in the ground, offering mute proof.

  The Rebels, screaming like Odin’s Vikings and Valkyries, hit the Night People in a rush. While some busied themselves herding the confused and shivering prisoners into the relative warmth of buildings, the other Rebels were bloodying their blades in the bellies and chests and heads of the nearly blinded creepies.

  The Rebels chopped the Night People into the snow, now crimson and trampled and littered with the dead and the dying.

  When Ben sensed that valor was overriding discretion, and that as many of the innocents as possible had been saved, he yelled for his people to fall back and pour in the lead.

  Within seconds, the rattle of automatic weapons fire shook the snow-covered and bloody streets of the city. Some innocents died. And Ben would have to live with that knowledge. But for every one who died, Ben and his Rebels pulled ten to safety.

  Thermopolis had never killed a man close up, never looked into the dying eyes, fading as the soul winged away. It was not something he enjoyed. But he did begin to understand something that had always eluded him: there really was a high in combat. A rush unlike anything he had ever experienced.

  And he also knew that he would never again be the same person. The siren’s call of the maidens who waited for the slain warriors to walk through any of the 540 doors of the palace of Odin had reached his ears. And he knew that at least part of him would always be so, until the day of Ragnarok, when he would march into his final battle.

  Probably beside Ben Raines, he thought. He didn’t know whether to be irritated or pleased.

  Emil had fought like an alley cat, leaping and slashing and yelling and spitting and talking in tongues. That in itself was enough to startle anyone.

  And far below Ben’s Rebels, West and Ike and Cecil and their troops were exacting a heavy toll on the creepies, and rescuing a large number of badly frightened and confused prisoners.

  The Night People would make no more attacks during that snowy time of darkness. They had lost several thousand people, thanks to Ben Raines’s unpredictability. The creepies who had managed to break free of the charge of the Rebels slipped under the city. No more for them, not this night.

  Ben looked down into the still-savage face of a dead creep. He felt no compassion, no pity. Nothing but contempt for any human being who would allow himself to sink as low as the Night People.

  “Compared to you,” he muttered, “Khamsin’s a pussycat.” He turned away and found Beth. “Stand the people down to a low alert. Get me reports from all units and start a count of the rescued. I want each one of them questioned. Sooner or later we’re going to have to go down into the bowels of this city. And we’re going to need every scrap of information we can get.”

  A creepie came out of the snow, bloody but still alive. He had a knife in his dirty hand. A shot rang out; a hole was punched into the ugly’s head. Ben turned. Jerre was standing a few feet from him, the muzzle of her M-16 still smoking.

  “Thank you, Jerre.”

  “You’re certainly welcome, Ben.” She turned and walked into a bullet-pocked building, leaving Ben standing amid the bodies on the bloody snow.

  “Always gets the last word,” Ben muttered. “Never fails.”

  For the first time in several days, most of the Rebels got a good night’s sleep, awakening to a very cold, sunny, and almost blindingly white dawn.

  Ben ate a welcome hot meal and then went over to Chase’s hospital, located in the old Jewish Memorial Hospital across from Fort Tryon Park on Broadway. His son met him there.

  “That was a very daring move last night, Father. It took everybody by surprise.”

  “Have you spoken with Doctor Chase this morning?” Ben sidestepped the compliment.

  “Yes. The newly freed prisoners are poor, pathetic creatures indeed. Most of this group are Canadians; been here about a year. Those who would respond to the questioning at all have confirmed that the empire of the Night People stretches around the world. That would confirm your theory as to why Khamsin left South America. But those here in the city are getting desperate. The move last night was an act of desperation. They’re running out of food.”

  Chase walked out of the hospital. He had on so many layers of clothing he looked like a small bear. And could roar like one. “Raines!” he bellowed. “My arthritis is killing me. I am not going to stand out here in the cold like an iceberg and talk with you. So will you kindly bring your butt inside?” He pointed at Jerre. “And I want to take a look at that ankle of yours, too.” He chuckled. “Nice ankle, I might add.”

  He walked back into the warmth of the hospital, Buddy and Ben and the others following. Cooper stayed with the Blazer.

  “Old goat,” Ben said, smiling. But he did not feel like smiling, not after receiving an urgent communiqué from Katzman just before leaving his CP. The message had numbed him for a moment.

  While Jerre went with a medic to have her ankle looked at — she was no longer limping — Ben and Buddy went into Chase’s office and poured coffee.

  Chase took note of
the expression on Ben’s face. “You look like a thundercloud, Ben. What’s the matter with you — you coming down with something?”

  “Later, Lamar. Bring me up to date on the prisoners.”

  “Physically, most of them will probably make it. Mentally, they’re a disaster area. Some of them even worse than that first bunch Cecil found over in Brooklyn. Buddy’s probably briefed you.”

  Ben nodded his head. “The creepies are really running out of . . . food?” He grimaced at the last.

  “Oh, they’ve got enough prisoners to sustain them through the winter and possibly the spring. I’ve been able to piece that much together from talking with the doctors treating them. They’re basket cases, Ben. We can probably bring the kids back . . . in time. Perhaps some of the adults. Maybe. But most of the adults? . . .” He shook his head.

  Ben rose, refilled his coffee cup and paced the office. He looked at Chase. “What do you intend to do with them, Lamar?”

  “I intend to treat them, Raines.” His reply was very frosty.

  “Hell, I know that, you old buzzard. Where do you plan on housing them? We don’t have a safe zone anywhere in the city. This hospital could be overrun at any time.”

  “Then you’re going to have to make this a safe zone, Ben.”

  “What am I, Lamar, a miracle worker?”

  “Relax, Ben. Sit down. I don’t mean to pressure you. Seeing these poor people’s got me edgy, that’s all. I think we’re going to have to talk about the use of chemicals again, Ben. We’re going to have to weigh the law of diminishing returns.”

  “And you think I haven’t been doing that?”

  Buddy sat quietly, saying nothing.

  “Ben, I know you have. I understand that a lot of things have been weighing heavily on your mind. And now something else had been added. You’re worried. Sometimes I can read you like a good book, old friend. So come on, spit it out.”

  With a sigh, Ben said, “Katzman’s decoding people have been working for several days breaking down several coded messages received from South Carolina. It seems that Khamsin has worked out a deal with the Night People. Khamsin and his army will be in the New York City area in about ten days.”