Alone in the Ashes

by William W. Johnstone

  The last thing Ben had done before calling it a day the afternoon before was to take the belts from some of the dead men and rig suspended harnesses for the M-16’s. From the ceiling, the harnesses would hold the M-16’s at the right height for the young people manning them; from the floor, the harnesses would prevent the weapons from jumping out of their young hands on full auto, and still keep the weapons aligned—more or less.

  The gun slits Ben had built had been constructed with each young person in mind; just to the right height to afford the maximum protection from bullets.

  Now, each person, with Ben being the exception, had twin M-16’s suspended and ready to go.

  Ben was ready with his homemade bombs, his RPG launcher, and his stack of fully loaded automatic shotguns taken from the dead men; along with several automatic weapons and, of course, his old faithful .45-caliber Thompson.

  Rani joined him on the ground floor with a cup of steaming hot tea. Together, they sipped tea and watched the horizon begin to lighten in the east.

  Ben was impassive as the sky grew brighter, allowing them to view what lay before them.

  Rani sucked in a hard gulp of air and let it out with a hiss. She clutched at his arm.

  “I see them,” Ben said.

  They were totally surrounded. Cars, trucks, vans, and motorcycles lined the area around the ghost town. What seemed to be hundreds of men stood quietly in a circle, facing the house from all conceivable directions.

  “I’ve tracked you across five states, Raines,” Jake spoke through a bullhorn, his electronically magnified voice booming out of the dawn.

  “Four states,” Ben calmly corrected.

  Rani looked up at him. “Please excuse him,” she said sarcastically.

  “But I’m open to a deal,” Jake said.

  “I can just imagine what it might be,” Ben muttered.

  “Yes,” Rani said.

  “You hear me, you skinny son of a bitch!” Jake roared.

  Rani looked Ben up and down and with a smile, said, “You could stand to put on a few more pounds.”

  “I’m very comfortable the way I am, thank you.”

  “You hear me, you asshole!” Jake roared.

  “Yes, I hear you, fatso!” Ben yelled. “No deals.”

  Some of Campo’s men giggled and Jake frosted them silent with a hard look.

  “I’m gonna skin that son of a bitch alive!” Jake growled. “After I make him watch while I fuck his woman and all them kids, right in front of his eyes. Boys and girls.”

  “Jesus, Jake!” one of his men yelled. “Them ain’t sandbags he’s got piled around the house. Them’s dead bodies.”

  West lifted his binoculars and looked, as did Texas Red and Cowboy Vic. The three of them exchanged uneasy glances.

  Even Jake swallowed hard after viewing the scene through field glasses. He shook his head. “Some people just ain’t got no class at all,” he said. “That’s unholy. He’ll go to hell for that.”

  Even Crazy Cowboy Vic looked at Jake oddly after that remark.

  Many of the outlaws standing in the circle around the house shuffled their feet and exchanged glances of indecision. It would not take much for some of them to split the scene and say to hell with Ben Raines.

  “Your life for them kids and the woman!” Jake lied.

  Ben looked at Rani. “I wish I had a 81-mm mortar,” he said. “I’d give that lardass an answer he’d never forget.”

  “Without taking anything away from your request, Ben,” Rani replied. “I’d like to see that platoon of your Rebels come riding up.”

  “Well, yes. I suppose I’d settle for that.”

  Those Rebels of Ben’s were on the way, but about half of them were in no condition for a fight.

  Using a range-finder, Ben plotted the distance at nine hundred yards. He picked up his bolt-action rifle and thumbed it off safety, adjusting the huge scope. Campo stood with an open van door in front of him. At this range, a head shot would be nearly impossible to make.

  But one outlaw, with more guts than sense—or maybe he was just plain stupid, that was probably it—was standing on top of the cab of a pickup truck. Ben sighted him in.

  “If you make that shot, Ben,” Rani said, “I’ll give you a present.”

  Ben looked at her and waggled his eyebrows. “Oh?”

  She grinned and patted him on the arm. “Calm yourself, old man. Heavy breathing will throw off your aim. Besides, are you sure you can handle me?”

  Ben gave her his best lewd grin.

  “Uh-huh,” she said.

  Ben propped the rifle on the sill for support, took aim, and gently squeezed the trigger. The outlaw flew off the top of the cab, a bloody hole in the center of his chest.

  “Now come and get us,” Jordy yelled from the top floor. “You fat-ass!”

  23

  The circle of outlaws moved as if controlled by one mind. The outlaws were growling and snarling like the animals they were. They were shouting obscenities at the house and its occupants.

  “Hold your fire!” Ben called, just loud enough for the kids to hear.

  The bolts of the twin M-16’s were pulled. The kids gripped the pistol grips, pressing the stocks against young shoulders, getting ready for the jar and slam of double-16’s on full auto.

  The circle drew nearer.

  Ben noticed that Campo, West, Texas Red, and Cowboy Vic had stayed back, well out of conventional rifle range.

  “True leaders of men,” Ben muttered.

  He picked up his .30–06 and clicked it off safety, lifting the stock to his shoulder and sighting in one particularly ugly outlaw.

  The part of the circle that had gathered at the rear of the old town had vanished into the ruins of the ghost town.

  Ben smiled, thinking: Only a few more seconds before one of them takes that one last long step.

  A hideous scream cut the air as an outlaw stepped into a mine shaft and went tumbling into eternity, howling as he fell.

  Ben pulled the trigger and blew off a man’s jaw. The man was flung backward, landing on his ass in the sand.

  “Fire!” Ben yelled.

  Twelve M-16’s, all older models, all fully automatic, began singing their death songs, yammering and spitting out lead.

  Ben was firing an AK-47 on full auto, the 7.62 ammo cutting great holes in the now-broken circle of outlaws.

  A man stepped into a punji trap, the sharpened stake driven through his foot, trapping him on the sands. He howled and beat his fists on the ground, all the fight gone from him.

  Ben let him howl.

  Behind Ben, on the other end of the first floor, Rani was manning her twin 16’s, the 16’s jumping in their harness, the floor around her twinkling with brass.

  Over the rattling and cracking of gunfire, the pinging of brass bouncing off the floor, Ben heard the faint screams of another man as he stepped onto the thin covering over a deep shaft. The man went howling into his frightened death.

  The circle of outlaws broke, splintering like an egg shell, leaving a half-dozen men trapped on the porch, their hands slick with the gore from the bodies they were forced to climb over getting to the porch.

  Ben dropped the empty AK and jerked up a sawed-off shotgun, an automatic that held nine three-inch magnums.

  Ben cleared the porch of all living things, the shotgun roaring in his hands.

  “Cease fire!” Ben yelled.

  The house fell silent. Now, only the moaning and crying and cursing and screaming of the wounded outlaws could be heard.

  “Sound off!” Ben called.

  A couple of the kids had scratches and splinters from the wood barricades in front of them; all had sore shoulders from the pounding of the twin 16’s, but again, against all odds, no one was seriously hurt.

  The area surrounding the house was littered with the dead and dying. The screaming from men caught in the punji traps was now hoarse, more animal than human.

  “Take the upstairs, Rani,” Ben said. �
��Tell the kids to go to the bathroom, get some water and food in them, and then you do the same. I’ll look after things down here.”

  Ben reloaded clips and checked his AK. He reloaded the sawed-off shotgun and then, with one eye toward the outside, he checked Rani’s twin M-16’s and reloaded some clips for her. When Rani returned from the upstairs, Ben went up and checked out the weapons, patting each young person on the shoulder, speaking calmly to them, complimenting them, and assuring them that it was almost over. Just hang in there, he told them.

  “Will we get to go back to your people when this is over, Mr. Raines?” Kathy asked.

  “You sure will, kids,” Ben told them. “And when you’re there, you’ll never have to be afraid again. And that’s a promise.”

  Jake Campo didn’t want to admit it, but the first tentative fingers of fear were lightly touching him. It was not a feeling he liked. Fear was almost unknown to the man. He had had his way all his life; even back in grade school, he had taken whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted it. The laws of a liberal society being what they were—when there was a government, with laws (as silly as many of them were), many of them catering to the punk, the lawless, the bully—boys like Jake had a field day with other kids less inclined to bully.

  Even when Jake had received three to five in prison for rape, he ran the joint (back when joint was jail and not something to smoke). Jake did that time (he was out in eighteen months) with ease. When he was charged with almost killing a man with his fists—he never did go to jail for that crime, the jails, at that time, being too crowded and federal judges not wanting to tax the sensitive criminal psyche—he began to have nothing but contempt for the legal system of America.

  Jake wasn’t alone in that contempt. Almost any law-abiding citizen with a modicum of intelligence felt nothing but contempt for America’s legal system.

  Jake looked at the house on the hill and knew, he knew, for the first time that he could remember, raw fear.

  West sat on a broken down chair and rubbed his aching stump. Would the goddamn thing ever heal?

  West hated Ben Raines. Loathed him. But he was afraid of Ben Raines. Scared to death of him. West wished they could just call this thing off and go on back to Tennessee. Jesus Christ! He couldn’t get over the sight of those bodies piled around the house and on the porch. And Raines had booby-trapped the town, too. West shuddered at the thought of falling into one of those mine shafts.

  God, what a way to die.

  He bet there were snakes down there in them pits, too. Snakes and rats eatin’ on the bodies.

  “Shit!” he muttered.

  Texas Red ran his fingers through his long red hair. He sat off by himself and engaged in, what was to him, heavy thinking.

  This whole operation was screwed up. Everything about it was screwed up. But he wasn’t gonna give up. No way.

  If any of them did that, word would get around the whole southwest that they let one man, one woman, and a handful of kids kick the shit out of three or four hundred men. Couldn’t let that happen.

  “So,” Red muttered, “that only leaves us one choice. Kill them all.”

  Crazy Cowboy Vic wasn’t scared of Ben Raines. Cowboy Vic wasn’t afraid of nothing. Cowboy Vic didn’t have sense enough to be afraid of anybody. He grinned as he pulled at his crotch. Thought about all them young girls in the house. Smooth tight pussies. Vic liked to hear the girls holler when he hurt them. That’s when he really got his rocks off. And Vic liked to kill. Didn’t make no difference to Vic who or what it was. Human or animal. He liked to kill; liked to torture.

  Far back as he could remember, he liked to torture animals. Skin them alive. Cut the paws off dogs and cats.

  Of course his parents knew about his aberrations. Of course his parents didn’t report him to the authorities. Victor was their darling little pride and joy.

  Not even when Little Victor buried the neighbor’s pet up to its neck and ran over it with a power mower did his parents report it. They concealed the fact. Heaven forbid anyone should learn they had a nut for a kid.

  They thought they were doing Victor a favor by keeping quiet about his ... strange behavior.

  There are a great many stupid parents in the world.

  Vic slobbered on himself as he thought about the kids in the house. And Ben Raines. He’d like to torture Ben Raines. Make him holler.

  Yeah! Good fun!

  “I wonder what they’re thinking?” Rani asked.

  “A lot of them are thinking about quitting,” Ben told her. “But the majority of them know they can’t quit. Word would get around that they were whipped by a handful of kids and one man and one woman. They can’t allow that to happen. They have to try to kill us to shut our mouths.”

  “We must have killed half of them,” she observed. “Or a lot of them have run away.”

  “We’ve wasted quite a few. But you’re right. A lot of them have hit the air.”

  Ben sat eating a can of cold beans, washing it down with water from his canteen.

  Rani looked at him, calmly eating amid the gore, and shook her head.

  “Hungry?” Ben asked.

  “No. How can you just sit there, with dead bodies all around us, and eat?”

  “Because I’m hungry,” Ben answered simply.

  “You know what I mean.”

  Ben jerked his thumb toward the outside. “Because of them, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t view them as human beings, Rani. It’s very doubtful any of those dead men ever, in their entire lives, did one decent thing—even back when we had a civilization. They were thieves, bully boys, thugs, rapists, muggers, street slime, rednecks, white trash, racists—you name it. If they had their choice between stealing and working, they stole. They beat their wives and girlfriends and abused their kids. They cheated on their income tax—if they even bothered to file—and the rest of us paid for it. To a man, they considered themselves smarter than the law and above obeying the laws the rest of us lived by. They filled every cheap honky-tonk in the country whenever they had a few bucks in their pockets and were looking for trouble. Their idea of fun was stomping somebody’s head in; usually somebody who just happened to come in for a quiet drink and hadn’t bothered a soul. They were loud-mouthed, profane, obnoxious, ignorant, crude, and rude. And when they died, if the undertaker would shove a tube up their rectum and give them an enema, they could have been buried in a matchbox. I don’t give any more thought to killing them than I would stepping on a roach or kicking a dried piece of dog shit off the sidewalk. That answer your question, dear?”

  She looked at him for a long moment before speaking. “There is a lot of arrogance in you, Mr. Ben Raines. Are you aware of that?”

  “A lot of people confuse a desire for order and discipline with arrogance, Rani. I went for a good many years in the Tri-States without firing a shot at anything other than a paper pop-up target. We who made up the Tri-States proved that a society totally void of crime is not only possible but very easy to attain.”

  “By trading one type of fear for another, Ben?”

  Ben smiled at that. “It’s a funny thing, Rani. But in all my years, I’ve never been afraid of the cops. If one obeys the law, there is no need to be fearful of authority.”

  She turned around, scanned her perimeter, and looked back at Ben. “And I bet you drove 55, too, didn’t you, Ben?”

  “Yes, I did. I didn’t like it; thought it was a stupid law. But it was the law, so I obeyed it. I never got a ticket, either.”

  She once more turned around, looking at the body-littered area around the house on the hill, overlooking the ghost town. With her back to Ben, she said, “You people in the Tri-States got a lot of negative publicity.”

  “Yes, we did, Rani. Our system of justice was harsh. It was a one-mistake society. But no one went hungry in the Tri-States. Not one person. No one was denied proper medical care. Everybody had a job. The taxes were fair. We didn’t allow huge corporations t
o swallow up the small farmer. We had damn few complaints from the people who chose to live in the Tri-States.”

  “You people also had quick trials, too, Ben.”

  “We sure did,” Ben said, giving his perimeter a once-over. “The legal profession, as you knew it, wasn’t the same in Tri-States. But there again, I don’t recall a single complaint from any legal resident of the Tri-States.”

  She shook her head. “What’s the point of arguing, Ben. It will never be again.”

  He looked at her, surprise on his face. “Of course, it will be, Rani. Not as big as before. But it will be.”

  “You really believe that, don’t you, Ben? God, you’re a dreamer, you know that?”

  “If we don’t put it back together, Rani, I firmly believe civilization will die.”

  She looked around her and reached for her twin 16’s. “If we don’t start paying attention, Ben, we’re going to die. Here they come again.”

  24

  This time the outlaws were much more cautious in their attack. They did not attempt to overwhelm the house by sheer numbers, electing to reach the crumbling buildings of the town and settle in.

  “War of nerves,” Ben said. “They’re going to try to wear us down.”

  “Mr. Ben!” Jordy called in a whisper from upstairs. “Your radio is talking!”

  On the second floor, Ben listened to his radio. The static was still there, but he was able to understand the transmission.

  “This is Eagle One,” Ben said. “Repeat, please.”

  “Eagle One, this is Captain Nolan. We’re two hours away from your location. Colonel Gray is less than a day from your position. Our forward scouts have you in visual. Do you copy this, General?”

  “I’m copying five by five, Captain. We can hold until you reach us.”

  “Dysentery hit us hard, General. I’m at no more than half strength. How do you want me to launch my attack?”

  “Get as close as you can and set up mortar teams. We’re holed up in the big house overlooking the town.”