Death in the Ashes

by William W. Johnstone

  “They’re not human beings,” Ben had told him. “That’s precisely why I am not treating them as such.”

  When they reached Buddy’s position on Interstate 70, Buddy and his team pulled out for Dillon, another tiny town on the route.

  “If the outlaws have damaged Eisenhower Tunnel, or just blown it closed, we’ll have to backtrack and take this old secondary road up to Kremmling. And then pray that Highway 34, which goes through the Rocky Mountain State Park, is still open. Hell with it,” Ben said, lifting his mike. “Eagle One to Rat.” Buddy’s team had been code-named the Rat Team while inspecting the tunnels in New York City.

  “Go, Eagle.”

  “Check out Eisenhower Tunnel—you should be within a few miles of it—and report back to me. We’ll stay put until you do so.”

  “Ten-four, Eagle. Rolling.”

  Ben leaned against the Blazer and waited for his son’s report. It was not long in coming.

  “Rat to Eagle.”

  “boy.”

  “The tunnel is blocked, Eagle. Filled with old cars and trucks; a path just wide enough for motorcycles to use is all there is.”

  “Estimate on time to clear it?”

  “Several days at least.”

  “All right, Rat. Return to our location.”

  “Ten-four, Eagle.”

  Ben turned his face north, to gaze at the old highway that would, he hoped, lead them to Kremmling. “It’s going to be a rough pull, gang.”

  That was putting it mildly.

  The highway was in such terrible shape the convoy was slowed to no more than a crawl in many areas. It turned out to be thirty-eight of the roughest miles Ben had traveled in a long time.

  It was almost dark when they reached the outskirts of Kremmling.

  And came very nearly driving smack into an ambush.

  Even Ben was later forced to admit that most of the Rebels’ attention had been focused on just trasversing the terrible highway. That changed in a hurry when the lead started flying and whining off the vehicles.

  Rebels poured out of the vehicles and took up defensive positions wherever they could find them.

  “Get those tanks off the trailers!” Ben spoke into his mike as he crouched by the side of the Blazer. “Somebody give me a report.”

  “Our ass is coming under fire,” Buddy radioed from his forward position.

  “Very funny, Rat. Can you be just a bit more informative?”

  The Rebels had the Colorado River to their backs and hostile fire in front of them.

  “Somebody doesn’t like us very much, Dad,” Tina added.

  “Clowns,” Ben muttered, very conscious of Corrie pressing close to him. It was not at all an unpleasant sensation.

  The Dusters were the first to wheel about and unleash their 40mm cannon fire at the muzzle flashes coming from the edge of the small town.

  The main battle tanks were unchained and roaring into life. They lowered their deadly snouts and blew everything in their path to hell with 105 HE rounds.

  Fifty caliber and 7.62 machine gun fire began raking the area. Ben let them all rock and roll for several minutes before he called a cease-fire.

  He lifted his mike. “If your ass is still intact, Rat, carry it up a few hundred meters and give me a report.”

  “I don’t have to carry it anywhere, Eagle. We were practically looking down the muzzles. They’re bugging out on motorcycles.”

  “Ten-four, Rat. Hold what you’ve got. Tanks up and check it out. Rebels behind the tanks. Let’s go in and do a little night hunting.”

  11

  But the outlaws were gone. As had been the case so often since Ben and his Rebels entered Colorado, the outlaws struck, and then pulled back.

  “Do you get the impression that we’re being baited?” Dan asked.

  “Yes.” Ben poured himself a cup of coffee and sat down in a canvas camp chair. “I’m beginning to feel that we are. And if that’s the case, and it’s Matt doing it, he’s got tricks up his sleeve. Or troops would be more like it.”

  “The outlaws that bugged out of Dallas?”

  “Probably. They were the more intelligent ones. Or street-smart might be a better way of putting it.”

  “There were several hundred who pulled out,” Dan said, “And that’s being conservative.”

  “Let’s use five hundred for a ball park figure. Five hundred behind us. Say . . . two thousand north of us; with another two thousand that Matt could pull in ... maybe more than that. Four to five hundred under Ashley’s command coming at us from the east. It’s shaping up to be a very interesting scrap, Dan.”

  “You going to alert Ike and Cecil?”

  “I don’t think so. Ike can have troops up here in ten or twelve hours. He’s got a combat team ready to go that can drop in anywhere we lay out a DZ. I think we’ll just play it by ear for the time being. We’ll get some rest tonight and inspect the town in the morning.”

  It was a mess.

  “These people have just got to be the trashiest people I have ever encountered,” Tina remarked.

  Filth was everywhere. It appeared to the Rebels that their enemy did not believe in bathing more than once or twice a year. The lice and fleas left behind in their discarded clothing prompted Dr. Ling to issue a disinfect order once they were free of the small town.

  The Rebels got the hell gone from the town.

  “For a little bit I’d change the planned route,” Ben said. “But I want to resupply at Fort Collins and get back on the Interstate system. As bad as it is, it’s a dream compared to the roads we’ve been traveling.”

  The Rebels headed east on Highway 40, stopping along the way to bathe in the Colorado River and let the medics spray them with disinfectant. They had all been scratching since the discovery of the lice and fleas.

  The town of Granby no longer existed. It had been destroyed by fire. Whether deliberate or by nature was anyone’s guess.

  They moved on, swinging north on Highway 34. They traveled just eighty miles that day, calling it quits at midafternoon at an old Ranger station in the Rocky Mountain National Park.

  “So beautiful and so peaceful,” Meg observed, taking in all the splendors of the wilderness. Deer were grazing nearby.

  And they could graze without fear of the Rebels. The Rebels did hunt, but only when their food supply was low. The Rebels did not hunt for sport. That was not to say that they all agreed with Ben’s philosophy about wildlife, for many certainly did not; the ranks of the Rebels were diverse. It was just that they all knew how Ben felt about so-called sport hunting, when it was not necessary for one’s own survival, and they would just rather not bring the wrath of the General down on their heads.

  “The way God planned it,” Ben replied. “And the way I intend to keep it ... if possible.”

  “I remember my father used to disagree with you about hunting,” Meg said.

  “Then he read me wrong—tike a lot of other people. I was never antihunting. Hell, I belonged to the NRA right up the end. I hunted as a kid. And the one thing that people could never rightly accuse me of was being a hypocrite. I was, quite simply, adamantly opposed to animal cruelty. And I despised poachers.”

  “General,” Meg began, shifting the topic, “where does all this end? I mean, surely you can’t possibly believe that you and a small force of men and women can restore America. ”That’s an . . . impossible dream.”

  “We don’t think so, Meg. I think that if you stay with us, you’ll change your mind. And I have no intention of restoring America to what it was. Far from it.”

  “Then ... ?” She looked up at the visionary, questions in her eyes.

  “I intend to make it better.”

  The Rebels reached Interstate 25 in the early afternoon of the next day. They had put the majestic Rocky Mountains behind them—at least for the time being.

  They found a small band of survivors in Loveland, once a city of more than thirty thousand. Five hundred determined men and woman had turne
d the place into a fortress against the roaming bands of outlaws. Many of them, men and women, openly cried when Ben and the Rebels rolled up to their blockades.

  It was here that Ben left the last of his settlers.

  Ben spoke with Cecil. “Get a team of Rebels up to Loveland, Cec. I’m going to clean out Greely first, then move up to Fort Collins. The spokespeople at Loveland say both towns are infested with outlaws and crud and the like. Bring in the team with the supplies. I’ll bump you as to when. Just have them ready and standing by.”

  “Ten-four, Ben. Recon reports a large force heading straight toward you from the east.”

  “Ashley and his bunch?”

  “That’s affirmative. And he’s picking up human crud as he goes. And there is a second force moving up behind you. Not quite as large, but big enough to cause you trouble.”

  “That’s the bunch that bugged out of Dallas. We’re aware of it, Cec. We’re going to sit right here in Colorado for a few days—maybe longer. Let’s see what they do about that.”

  “Ten-four, Eagle. Hawk out.”

  “Let’s go have a look at Greely, gang.”

  Ben set up a temporary CP in a small town just east of Interstate 25, on the road leading to Greely. He could not shell the small city because he did not know how many, if any, prisoners were being held in the city.

  “It’s going to have to be go in eyeball to eyeball,” he told his people. “Now this bunch has automatic weapons. M16s, Uzis, AK47s. They have no artillery. Like most outlaw gangs we’ve faced in the past, this bunch has always relied on brute force to overwhelm people. So we’ll play their game. Main battle tanks as spearheaders, followed by Dusters, followed by us. Let’s go.”

  The rumbling of fifty-ton tanks reached the ears of the outlaws and did nothing to calm the already jittery nerves of the men behind the blockades; blockades that they now realized were very flimsy when held up against the main battle tanks rolling and clanking in their direction.

  The battle tanks lowered the muzzles of their 105s and turned the roadblocks into smoking piles of bloody rubble. Then the Dusters opened up with 40mm cannon fire and the road was opened.

  The Dusters and main battle tanks veered off, splitting up and rumbling up the streets on the edge of town, machine guns snarling and spitting.

  “Rebels, out!” Ben told Corrie, and she relayed the message.

  This time, before anyone could stop him, Ben overran his own lines and led the charge, with Beth, Corrie, Jersey, and Cooper right behind him.

  “Bogies in there!” Ben shouted, pointing to an old service station as he ran past it.

  Cooper tossed a Fire-Frag grenade through the busted window and ran after Ben. When the Fire-Frag blew, and it was perhaps the most powerful and lethal grenade ever manufactured, the explosion and the hundreds of tiny fragments it released splattered the walls with what remained of the outlaws who had taken refuge in the building.

  A half-dozen other Rebels, driven toward Ben’s position by the roaring of Dan Gray, reached Ben’s team. He waved them all down into a ditch. Ben clamped the bipod onto the gas cylinder and cylinder lock of his M14 and slipped a thirty-round clip into the belly of the old Thunder Lizard.

  “A group of crud ran into that house right there,” Ben said, nodding his head toward a frame home about a hundred meters away. Then he cut loose with half a clip of 7.62 rounds, stitching the wood and bringing screams of pain from those inside. He smiled. “I believe we’ve found us some bogies, gang.”

  But not for long. The dozen Rebels cut loose with M16s and M60s, soon turning the frame house into a death house.

  “Check it out,” Ben told the Rebels who had joined him.

  Less than ninety seconds later, the Rebels waved the others on.

  Hard-fighting Rebels, offering no quarter and taking no prisoners, cleared a dozen blocks in any direction within the hour, putting the so-called tough outlaw bikers into a rout.

  “Chase them down and dispose of them,” Ben ordered.

  Hummers and Jeeps leaped forward, each one equipped with either a .50 caliber or 7.62 M60 machine gun. Many of the fleeing outlaws were chased and gunned down.

  “House to house,” Ben ordered, and then with his team, he personally took one side of the block where he was standing. When he had swept his perimeter, he told Corrie, “Tell those back in Loveland to enter this city. Start taking whatever they think they can use, either now or in the future. They have four days, dawn to dusk, to do it. Then we destroy this city.”

  The Rebels were still mopping up on the east side of the city when the settlers entered the west end and began taking materials they felt they might need.

  “Five Rebels wounded, General,” Dan reported. “Three will need to be sent back to Base Camp One with the returning birds. No dead on us.”

  “Corrie, tell base camp to send replacements up with the planes. We want to stay full strength. Dan, an estimate on outlaw dead?”

  “Rough guess. I’d say a hundred and fifty, give or take twenty-five. About a hundred got away.”

  “Prisoners?”

  “Fifty or so. Badly used and very frightened. Dr. Ling had them transported back to Loveland. And we have some prisoners ... reluctantly on our part. They were groveling and snuffling about at our feet. One of them even wanted a lawyer.”

  “Wonderful. Of course you told him we’d have one sent in immediately?”

  “Oh, but of course!”

  “Have them transported back to my CP. I want to talk to them.”

  They were just as scummy and stinking and sorry a lot as the others of their ilk Ben had encountered on this run.

  “You ain’t got nary rat to do this, soldier boy,” one told Ben.

  “What did he say?” Dan leaned forward. “What in heaven’s name is a naryrat?”

  “Did somebody call me?” Buddy stuck his head in the building, responding to his nickname.

  “I think he did.” Dan pointed at the outlaw.

  “I ain’t neber done no sich of a thang!” the biker said.

  “What did he say?” Buddy asked.

  “Enough!” Ben held up his hand. “Now I’m getting confused.” He looked at the outlaw. “I’ll be up front with you. You’re going to die. That’s a one hundred percent guaranteed fact. How you die is up to you. I can hang you or have a medic give you a lethal injection, which, so I’m told, is a much more humane method of execution. Not that you deserve it, for I find you and your kind to be among the least-humane people I have ever encountered.”

  The outlaw stared at Ben.

  “I don’t believe the cretin understands English,” Dan said.

  “I ain’t got a fuckin’ thang to say to you, soldier boy.” The biker spat out the words, filling the immediate area with bad breath.

  “Your choice.” Ben nodded to Dan, who prodded the biker to his boots with the muzzle of his weapon. “Bring the next one in, Buddy.”

  “Can I smoke?” the outlaw said after Buddy had pushed him into a chair.

  “You might as well. It’ll probably be your last one.”

  The biker’s hands were shaking as he finally managed to roll a cigarette. “You’re a real hard-ass, ain’t you, Ben Raines?”

  “Yes. How do you know my name?”

  “I seen your pitcher years back, when you was writin’ them books. You ain’t got no purtier.”

  Ben had to smile. The biker was just as hard as he was. He knew he was going to die, but he was going to die well. “You’re not exactly the last rose of summer yourself. You part of Satan’s organization?”

  “Yep.”

  “You kidnap people to trade to the Night People?”

  “Naw. We just use ’em as slaves and fuck ’em and so forth. Then swap ’em off to other gangs.”

  “How about Snake and Satan?”

  “What about ’em?”

  “They deal with the Night People?”

  The biker paused. “I heard they did. But I ain’t never seen it personal.�
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  “How many men does Snake have in his organization?”

  The biker smiled, then told Ben where to go, how to get there, and where to stick what on the way.

  Ben glanced at Buddy. “Put him down by injection.”

  Buddy looked puzzled. “Why, Father?”

  Ben shrugged. “He may be trash, but he’s got balls.” He cut his eyes to the biker. “Too bad you picked the wrong side.”

  “Nobody forced me, Raines. So don’t go sheddin’ no tears for me.” He pointed a finger at Ben. A very dirty finger. “I’m gonna tell you something, Raines. I didn’t pick the wrong side. I couldn’t live under your rules, that’s all. I could have cleaned up my act and joined your Rebels. And I probably would have been a good soldier. You believe that?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, I do,” Ben surprised him by saying. “But now are you going to sing me some sad songs about how you were abused as a child, or you are what you are because of society, or some such crap as that?”

  The outlaw laughed. “Hello, no! That’s garbage and you know it as good as I do. I am what I am because it’s what I wanted to be. It’s as simple as that. You been right all these years.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Larry. Last names don’t matter much no more.”

  “You want to live, Larry?”

  “Everybody wants to live, Raines. But if you’re askin’ me to suck up to you and be a snitch or whatever, forget it. Just bring the needle out and put me down.”

  “Why?”

  “‘Cause eventually, you’re goin’ to win this fight. It’s gonna take you a long time—years—but you’ll do it. And just the thought of livin’ under your rules makes me wanna puke!”

  “Is there not one shred of decency in you, man?”

  Larry thought about that for several moments. Then he shook his head and frowned. “Your idea of the word, Raines?”

  “If that’s the way you want to put it, yes. But decency is decency, Larry. You know that. Stop playing games. We—all of us—have to have a moral foundation to live by. We’ll revert back to anarchy without it. Hell, you’re living proof of that!”

  The biker grinned. “That’s true, for a fact. That’s a pretty speech, Raines. Why don’t you put that on my tombstone?”