Courage In The Ashes Read online

  “Over here, sir!” a Rebel yelled to Buddy.

  Buddy walked over and looked into one of the few buildings still intact in the town. The former slaves lay in still, silent, bloody rows, where they had been cut down by automatic weapons’ fire.

  “My God, there are children in there,” Buddy whispered

  “Yes, sir,” a Rebel spoke through tight lips. “We have prisoners, sir.”

  “You better not have them ten minutes from now,” Buddy told her.

  She smiled. The new battalion commander was working out just fine. She’d pass the word. Buddy Raines was just as hard-nosed and tough as his father. Some said he was better-looking than the General. She didn’t think so. But then, she’d always liked older men.

  Buddy waved to a platoon leader. “Yes, sir?”

  “Get a burial team and get those bodies out of that building, Lieutenant. Prepare them for burial.”

  “Right, sir.”

  Striganov and Dan drove up and dismounted, walking over to the house. The Russian and the Englishman looked inside the building and grimaced at the sight.

  Just as they were walking toward Buddy, the sounds of shots came to them.

  “A pocket of trouble, son?” Georgi asked.

  “Not anymore, sir,” the young Raines replied. “That was a firing squad.”

  * * *

  Ike and his battalions hit no trouble until they reached Glenallen. There, a stubborn group of outlaws had chosen to stand and fight rather than follow Moose’s suggestion to get the hell gone from that area.

  “You’re all stupid,” Moose had told them. “Dumb. Raines is gonna roll right over you and mash you flat.”

  “He’s got a bunch of women in his army,” the leader of the gang said. “Hell, women can’t fight. Ever’body knows that. Women ain’t good for nothin’ ’cept to fuck.”

  “You’re a fool!” Moose told him, then left that area as quickly as he could.

  “Listen to this,” Therm said, walking up to Ike. Thermopolis held a small transistor radio in his hand. “They’ve got the radio station going. All talk, you might say,” he added dryly. He turned up the volume.

  “All you cunts in the Rebel Army listen up,” the voice came through the tiny speaker. “You show your ass in this town and you’re gonna get a dick shoved up it.”

  A female tank commander popped her head out of the open hatch of a main battle tank. “What the hell did he say?” she asked.

  Ike leaned against his Hummer and smiled, a plan formed up in his mind. “Turn the volume up, Therm.”

  “Any man who would fight alongside some pussy is a pussy,” the voice sprang out of the speaker.

  “Is that right?” a Rebel said sarcastically.

  “The Rebel Army ain’t got nothin’ but a bunch of fags and cunts in it.” The voice continued spewing garbage.

  “All the men stand down for this one,” Ike told his communications specialist. “Advise the ladies that this town is theirs.”

  “Yes, sir!” she said, and gave the orders. She quickly gave the orders and handed her backpack radio to a startled Thermopolis. “Here,” she told him. “You handle it for a few minutes.” She unslung her M-16 and walked off.

  “I don’t know how to work this goddamn thing,” Therm said, looking at the complicated piece of equipment. “I never could figure out how to program my own VCR.”

  “Well, don’t look at me,” Ike said, glancing at the radio. “I know how to turn it on and that’s just about it.”

  The voice continued to spew profanities out of the speaker, telling in very crude detail what he and his men would do to any female Rebel who dared enter this man’s town.

  Thermopolis looked around as his wife, Rosebud, and several of her friends from the old commune started walking up the road, to the crest of a small rise. “Where are you going?” he called.

  “To teach some men some facts about women,” she called over her shoulder. “Just work the damn radio.”

  “Hell, I don’t know how!” he called.

  “You’ll figure it out. I have a great deal of faith in you.” She kept walking, her M-16 at combat-ready.

  The tank commander buttoned down her hatch, and the MBT clanked forward, the muzzle of the 105mm level.

  Rosebud assumed a prone position on the crest of the rise and put a full clip of .223’s into a frame house on the edge of town. Fly, Swallow, Wren, and Zelotes followed suit and put approximately 120 fast rounds into the frame house. Men started bailing out of the side and back doors.

  The MBT clanked up and put one round into the bullet-pocked house. The house exploded. Wood and glass erupted into the air. A half a dozen other tanks lumbered up. Each was commanded by women Rebels.

  “Fall in, ladies,” a tank commander told the swelling group of women on the crest of the rise. “Let’s go teach some rednecks about women.”

  “Holy shit!” an outlaw breathed, looking at the sight through binoculars. “I’m gone, man. Like right now.” He jumped up and took a .308 slug from a sniper rifle right through his guts. He lay on the street and screamed until a sniper named Doris put a round through his head.

  The MBTs rumbled forward. Several platoons of women walked behind them. Other tanks followed the women.

  “Never piss off the weaker sex,” Ike told Therm.

  “Are we going in after them?” Therm asked.

  “Hell, no! Besides, you really think they need any help?”

  “I suppose not,” he admitted.

  One MBT smashed into a house and drove clear through it, charging out the other side. The men who were in the home now were a permanent part of the foundation, for they had been mashed into bloody globs under the treads of the 63-ton fighting machine.

  Several outlaws jumped into the cab of a pickup truck and tried to make a run for it. The commander of an MBT swung the turret, leveled the 105, and the pickup truck vanished in a ball of exploding flames.

  M73 and M85 machine guns began yammering and howling. The 7.62 and .50-caliber slugs kocked holes in the buildings of the town, sending outlaws scrambling into the open. The tight-lipped and extremely pissed-off gunners chopped them into raw chunks.

  Some outlaws cleared the town, running for their lives, only to race headlong into the very hostile and accurate rifle fire of Rosebud and her friends, who lay on the crest of the hill, carefully picking their targets.

  The driver of a LAV-25 smashed into and through a shed, coming snout to face with a big pus-gutted outlaw. The commander lowered her Hughes M242 Bushmaster 25mm chain gun and smiled at the outlaw as the chain gun came level with his face. Using her outside speaker, she said, “Are you the asshole who said women were good for nothing except sucking dicks?”

  “Uh . . .” the outlaw replied.

  “I’ll take that as affirmative,” she said. She inched the assault vehicle forward, pinning the man against a tree. She dropped the chain gun several inches. “Suck it,” she told him.

  The outlaw-murderer-rapist then proceeded to give the muzzle of the Bushmaster an outstanding blow-job.

  “I think we should move in now,” Thermopolis told Ike.

  “You move in,” Ike replied. “I ain’t movin’ a lick ’til those ladies get the mad out of their systems.”

  “I suppose you’re right.”

  “Cain’t you take a joke?” an outlaw screamed, running down the road, a Duster right on his tail. He had lost his rifle and was fleeing for his life.

  “I’m about to take out a joke,” the crew chief muttered. She accelerated and ran over him, leaving a glob of crud on the blacktop.

  The town of Glenallen had never been more than a very small hamlet, with a population of about five hundred before the Great War. When the Rebels radioed back that the town was secure, only a few buildings were left standing and no outlaws were alive. A few had escaped, running into the brush and timber. But their attitude toward women—especially women Rebels—had changed.

  “Now we can go in,” Thermo
polis said.

  “I’ll follow you,” Ike told him.

  “You’re the General,” Therm said. “You lead.”

  Ike got into his Hummer and buttoned it up tight.

  “Coward,” Therm told him.

  “Smart,” Ike countered.

  The column moved forward, stopping in the middle of the ruined town. Ike grinned and saluted a woman tank commander. She smiled and returned the salute.

  “Mission accomplished, General McGowan,” she called.

  “Damn sure is,” Ike muttered. He started to ask how the muzzle of her 25mm Bushmaster got all wet. He decided he really didn’t want to know.

  THIRTEEN

  “Give me a report, Jersey,” Ben said from his hospital bed.

  “First section is approximately 150 miles outside of Anchorage and second section is standing down for the night about fifty miles outside of Delta Junction. No Rebel casualties reported.”

  “Any firefights?”

  “Small ones. Nothing major. A bunch of outlaw trash and rednecks insulted the women Rebels’ ability to fight in a small town called Glenallen. Ike told the women to take the town. They took it.”

  Ben smiled. “I just bet they did. Anything new from the lower forty-eight?”

  “Intelligence reports that Sister Voleta is firmly established in Michigan, her movement growing slowly but steadily.”

  “We’ll deal with her on the way back east,” Ben said. “Thank you, Jersey.”

  She left his room. Corrie was outside the door, holding Smoot on a leash. Ben wanted the dog in with him but Doctor Chase had nixed that for the time being.

  “How is he?” Beth asked.

  “Getting restless,” Jersey said. “I bet you he’ll be up and going before Northstar is over.”

  “No bet there,” Cooper said. “But Chase will have the final say on that.”

  “Get that damn dog out of my hospital I” Chase roared.

  “You leave my dog alone!” Ben hollered.

  Moose looked at the gathering of gang leaders. “Another gang just went under the heel of the Rebels,” he told them. “I tried to warn them nuts at Glenallen that they was too small a force to stand and fight the Rebels. They wouldn’t listen and now they’re dead. People, we got to get smarter than Ben Raines if we’re gonna make it out of this alive. That’s all there is to it, and there ain’t no other way.”

  “How do we do that?” Foley asked. “There ain’t none of us ever gonna win no prizes for smarts.”

  “Maybe that’s the way to go,” an outlaw leader said. “Play on Raines’ sympathies.”

  “Raines don’t have no sympathy for outlaws, Smithers. None a-tall. He don’t buy none of that headshrinker crap about the poor underprivileged folks turning criminal ’cause they got a hard-on towards society . . . or some such shit as that. And we all know he’s right.”

  “My daddy used to whip me something fierce,” Bonny Jefferson said. “He made me what I am today.”

  Hoots and catcalls and rough laughter greeted Bonny’s words. Jake said, “There ain’t nobody made you what you is except yourself, Bonny. So don’t go layin’ your past on someone else’s doorstep. I’ve read Raines’ work, back when I was in prison down in Kansas. He wrote a hell of an action-adventure book and a good western. I wanted to kill the son of a bitch then—’course I still do—but in my heart I knew he was right.” He sighed. “But I ain’t about to go changin’ my ways this late in the game. Has anybody got a plan?”

  “All that equipment at them military bases,” Dixson said. “All them tanks and heavy artillery and stuff and folks just let ’em rust out.”

  “Couldn’t nobody run the goddamn things,” a lifelong resident and criminal of Alaska said. “Too complicated. Too late now. All the guns been stripped off the hulls.”

  “What do we have to fight Raines with?” Buster asked. “We got to tally this up.”

  The men were meeting in a town just north of Anchorage. Alaska’s largest city was filled to overflowing with almost any type of undesirable one might care to name. Almost ten thousand of them. And they were dug in and ready for a fight.

  “We can make a damn good stand of it,” Foley said. “But we got to face this fact: the Rebs will overwhelm us eventually. If we could have got those assholes up in Fairbanks to join us, we might have had a chance of actually holding Raines off and maybe striking a deal with him.”

  “Ben Raines don’t make deals with the likes of us,” Jake said. “So put that out of your mind. He’s found the mass graves and he’ll find more as they advance, all the rooms full of dead slaves, and he’s heard all the stories the survivors has told about us. He won’t make no deals with us.”

  “Jake’s right,” Moose said. “We’re all lookin’ at the end, boys.”

  The gang members sat in silence, letting that soak in. One finally stood up from the table and walked to a dirty window, staring out. “I’ll not piss and moan about it,” he said. “Ben Raines don’t offer no quarter, by God, I ain’t gonna expect or give none. I’ll fight ’til they kill me.”

  “I’ll go along with that,” Dixson said.

  “All right, here it is,” Moose said. “I don’t like it, but it’s the best I can come up with. Raines is gonna have planes and choppers all over the goddamn place, so splittin’ up and takin’ to the timber ain’t worth a damn. He’s settin’ up them outposts and armin’ the survivors. If we did try to hide, they’d kill us the instant we surfaced. So . . . I guess I got to eat my previous words and say we join up with them down in Anchorage. Any objections?”

  “Strength in numbers,” Foley said.

  “And when Anchorage falls?” Bonny said.

  “We head down onto the peninsula and join up with that terrorist bunch that come through.”

  “And after that?” Buster asked. “We’re dead,” Moose said “So it don’t really matter, does it?”

  “We’ll hit trouble tomorrow at Delta Junction,” Georgi said to his commanders. “Fort Greely was located just outside of there, so the outlaws in the town will be heavily armed. Scouts report that a very elaborate system of roadblocks are now in place. A survivor—a former slave of the crud and crap—says they plan to inflict as many casualties on us as possible, then fall back to Fairbanks and link up with the scum who control that city. Tomorrow morning, the campaign ceases to be a milk run.”

  “How many are we facing?” Buddy asked.

  “About a thousand men. With heavy machine guns, mortars, rocket launchers.”

  Dan lifted a dog-eared copy of a tourist guide and studied it for a moment. He smiled, but the humor did not reach his eyes. “Says here that an annual barbecue is held on the first Sunday in August in Delta Junction. We’re going to be a little bit early for that. Perhaps we can host our own barbecue?”

  The Russian smiled at him. “An excellent suggestion, Colonel. Tell the artillery to commence firing as soon as they’re ready.”

  One hundred and fives and 155’s began shelling the town within the hour, hurling 42.9-pound and 102.5-pound high explosive antipersonnel grenades into the town, dropping them in with deadly accuracy. Cursing the Rebels in general and Ben Raines in particular, the outlaws who had operated out of the town with savage impunity for years began their retreat toward Fairbanks. They left behind them the bodies of more than five hundred who had been killed during the first moments of the artillery barrage, which caught them totally unprepared. They had been operating under the assumption that the Rebels wanted to save the towns. They learned very quickly that the Rebels did not give a damn for the physical makeup of the towns. The Rebels were interested in disposing of outlaws in the most efficient manner available to them.

  Under cover of darkness, the Rebels moved closer, staying behind the main battle tanks. Dawn found three battalions of Rebels sitting at the back door of the burning and shattered town.

  Georgi, Dan, and Buddy studied the ruined town through long lenses.

  “Take it,” Georgi ordered.


  Scouts were the first ones in. They reported back that there was no sign of life in what was left of the town at the end of the Alaska Highway. From this point, the Rebels would be traveling on the Richardson Highway toward Fairbanks, one hundred miles away.

  Buddy picked through the smoking rubble, inspecting a dozen or more bodies. He walked back to Georgi and Dan.

  “They shot their wounded in the back of the head,” he told the older men. “And I want a doctor to look at the sores on these bodies.”

  A Rebel doctor took skin samples and scrapings and drew blood. “Get into gloves and handle these bodies carefully, stack them in the rubble, and burn what is left of the town,” he ordered. “Anyone with an open cut stay the hell out of town. These people were suffering from advanced syphilis. I’ll get word back to Dr. Chase.”

  “So it’s a sure bet those in Fairbanks will also be infected,” Ben said after Lamar broke the news to him.

  “Some of them, yes. I just spoke with Ike. His people have not yet encountered any such problems down south.”

  “I want to get out of bed.”

  “You’ll keep your ass in bed until I tell you to get out of bed. And if you argue with me I’ll knock you down with drugs and you can stay in never-never land for a couple of weeks.”

  “You wouldn’t!”

  “You’d like to maybe place a wager on that?”

  The Rebels continued their relentless advances on two fronts. They could all sense that the North American campaign was rapidly drawing to a close and Europe was right around the corner. They knew that the taking of two of the largest cities in Alaska was not going to be easy, but they also knew it would be nothing like their taking and destroying of New York City or Los Angeles.

  On the Kenai Peninsula, Lan Villar monitored radio transmissions and shook his head in disgust and despair. “How in the hell did Ben Raines ever get so powerful?” he questioned. “He started out with a Mississippi Redneck, a Navy doctor, and a nigger, and ended up with the largest army in the entire damn world! He fought the Russian, then the damn Russian joined him. He fought the mercenary, then the damn mercenary joined up with him. How in the hell did he ever put together so many people of like mind?”