Alone in the Ashes Read online

  With Rani walking with him, Ben showed her the location of the supplies and the truck. “See that small ridge beginning just behind the house?” he asked, pointing.

  “Yes.”

  “If I sense the situation is turning bad,” he said, “I want you and the kids to head out. Get the truck and head in the direction it’s pointed. It’ll be rough, but you should make it to Highway 118.”

  “Ben? ...”

  “Listen to me! We have no radio contact at all. None. We’re in a very bad situation. We’re going to be outgunned a hundred to one. At least. I don’t know where Captain Nolan and his platoon might be. But they know I’m here. They’ll fight through hell to reach me; that’s our only hope. But if and when I say Go, you and the kids go. You understand?”

  She slowly nodded her head.

  “All right. That’s settled. And I don’t expect any argument from you when I give the word.” He faced her, putting his hands on her shoulders. “Now listen very carefully to me, Rani. Forget all vestiges of civilized behavior. They no longer apply. You cannot afford the luxury of mercy or pity for those two-legged filth coming at us. I do not take prisoners, Rani. And neither do any of my personnel.” Her eyes widened at this, but she said nothing. “I have neither the time, facilities, nor inclination for attempted rehabilitation. For the most part, it didn’t work back when we had a civilization, and could spend millions of taxpayer dollars fucking around with criminals, when the biggest part of them should have been put up against a wall and shot to begin with. If you ever fail to shoot, and that action results in our position being overrun, I will find the time, believe me, to put a bullet in your head.”

  Her summer tan paled at his words. “You ...” she stammered. “You don’t mean that!”

  “The hell I don’t, honey.”

  “We’re stuck!” a sergeant said to Captain Nolan.

  “It appears that way,” Nolan replied. “And it looks like it’s being done deliberately.”

  “Our people on the roofs say we’re pretty well evenly matched, person for person. I don’t think they want to meet us nose on.”

  “I get the same impression. But we may have to force the issue. But if we do, we’re going to take some losses. Those people are well placed. I think our best bet is to keep our heads down for a couple more days. See what develops. But we’re not going to set around with our thumb up our ass while we wait. We command the high ground. And that’s going to defeat those assholes out there. Have your mortar people start ranging in the key locations. Make goddamn sure our trucks in the alley behind us are protected at all times. When we decide to go, we’re going to do it fast and hard. Take off.”

  Jake Campo was traveling fast, only giving the area he assigned himself a perfunctory once over at best. No, Jake was in a hurry, for he wanted Ben Raines all to himself, and he thought he knew where Raines might be holed up.

  West was highballing it south, cursing and hollering for his driver to hurry up. Raines had headed south; he just knew it. And he wanted that son of a bitch all to himself.

  Texas Red had studied Raines’ movements up to when those other assholes had lost him, and had reached the conclusion Ben had headed due south. That would put him right smack in the Big Bend National Park. And Texas Red was going to get there first.

  Cowboy Vic had said, on the second day out, “Fuck Del Rio!” He had ordered his people to head for the Big Bend. He didn’t want Ben Raines nearly as bad as he wanted Rani and them tight little cunts with her. Gettin’ Raines would just be some icin’ on the cake.

  Colonel Gray studied the maps and made up his mind. With the roads as bad as they were, those stupid warlords popping up all over the place, like crazied jackrabbits, it was going to be a hard four to five day push to southwest Texas.

  “Dallas to Abilene to Pecos, and then we’ll cut south,” he gave the orders. “Two squads out ranging a full twenty miles ahead of the main column. Clear the way for us. No quarter, no prisoners. Move out.”

  Ben ordered every available container of water inside the house. He then began boarding up ground-level windows. He cleared the area around the house of any object that might afford the enemy protection from bullets, leaving the scrub bushes as they were, still giving the place a long-deserted look.

  “Now comes the hardest part,” he said.

  Rani looked at him.

  “Waiting.”

  Ben looked around him and had to smile. He had commanded some ragtag troops in his lifetime, but this bunch would have to take the cake. Robert and Kathy, twelve years old. Jane, eleven years old. Jordy and Paul, ten years old. All armed. All grim-faced. All ready for a fight.

  Two adults and five kids against five or six hundred outlaws.

  On Ben’s sixth day in the old ghost town, the first band of outlaws hit them.

  20

  “We’re breaking out of this box, Sergeant,” Captain Nolan said. He looked at his watch. 0630. It would be full light in twenty to thirty minutes. “Are the troops ready?”

  “Yes, sir. Chompin’ at the bit to go.”

  Nolan lowered his binoculars. “Very little movement from the other side. Most of them are probably still sleeping. Tell the mortar teams to start laying down fire.”

  “Yes, sir!” the sergeant said with a grin.

  The mortar barrage caught the outlaws by surprise. For several days the only reply from the trapped Rebels had been some small-arms fire. The HE and WP rounds from the Rebels caught the outlaws with their pants down—in many cases, literally.

  The white phosphorus hit just after the high explosive rounds, searing through leather and steel and flesh and bone. The outlaws did not have time to recover from their initial shock before looking up into the hard faces of the Rebels as the tiger-striped men and women charged the outlaws’ positions. In most cases, that one look was their last look at anything pertaining to this life.

  Captain Nolan’s people took no prisoners.

  The Rebels suffered two dead and five wounded. Of the wounded, only one was serious, but she was on her booted feet, refusing to be left behind.

  Raines’ Rebels broke out of the small town, barreling south. They still had several miles to go before reaching the General.

  “A lot of dust coming from the west, Ben!” Jordy shouted from his post on the second floor of the old house.

  “How many vehicles, Jordy?” Ben called, then realized the boy still could not count past ten.

  “Bunches, Ben.” The boy looked through the binoculars Ben had given him. He laboriously counted to ten, made a mark in the dust of the floor, and started again. “Ten and seven, Ben!” he called.

  “Good boy!” Ben shouted. “Now stay down.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Turning to Rani, Ben said, “Figuring four to a vehicle, we’re up against sixty-five to seventy outlaws.” He grinned. “That’s good.”

  “That’s good?” she asked.

  “Yeah. We have them outnumbered.”

  She looked at him as if he had gone mad.

  Ben called his “troops” around him. “Now listen, kids. Don’t fire until I tell you to fire. All the young people into the room we fixed up for you. Stay down and stay quiet. It’s going to be very noisy, kids. But we’re going to make it. OK? Take off.” He looked at the remaining kids and at Rani. “You all know your positions; get to them.”

  “How come you so damn sure Raines is hidin’ out down here?” an outlaw asked West.

  “I feel it in my guts, that’s why,” the stump-legged West replied. “All them people we talked to said he was headin’ south. All signs point south. That there Rani cunt was headin’ south. Remember that piece of map Texas Red found? It had Terlingua circled in pencil. They here. I know it.”

  The outlaw column halted about a half-mile from the ghost town.

  “Why we stoppin’?” West was asked by his driver.

  “To rec . . . recon ... look the situation over, you idiot. We ain’t gonna make no rash moves this tim
e around.”

  “’At makes sense.”

  “Course it do. Gimmie them field glasses.”

  While West was viewing the town through binoculars, he was unaware that Ben was looking at him.

  “West,” Ben said to Rani. “He’s trash, just like the others. Maybe even worse than some. I should have killed him when I had the chance.”

  “Why didn’t you?” she asked.

  “I gave my word. And that is something I won’t break.”

  “Not even to an outlaw?”

  “Not even then.”

  “Ben!” Jordy called in a hoarse whisper.

  “Right here, son.”

  “More cars and trucks comin’ at us from the east.”

  “OK. Stay alert.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Ben moved to the other end of the house and lifted his binoculars. That short column, ten cars and trucks, halted their movement about a mile from town. Through the long lenses, Ben caught a flash of bright red hair.

  “Has to be Texas Red,” he muttered.

  “Let me see,” Rani asked, holding out her hand for the binoculars. She lifted them to her eyes, focused them in, and said, “Yes. That’s him. He’s filth.”

  “Then that makes our job easier, doesn’t it?”

  “What do you mean, Ben?”

  “I don’t take prisoners,” he reminded her.

  “Ben, we’re outnumbered, or soon will be, a hundred to one. And you’re talking about taking prisoners!”

  Ben grinned. “Always think positive, darling.”

  She walked back to her position, shaking her head.

  “Texas Red and his boys is on the other side of town, West,” one of the outlaw’s henchmen informed him.

  “That was all that dust we seen comin’ down.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Skirt the town to the south. Make contact with Red. We gotta plan this out. We don’t wanna be shootin’ each other tryin’ to get Raines.”

  From the second floor, Ben watched the lone man leave West’s column and begin his skirting of the town. He picked up his .30–06 and adjusted the scope for range. The man was a good thousand yards away. Too far. Ben let him work a little closer. The ammo Ben was using was, of course, handloaded, but this was beefed up to the max by his ordinance people. If the situation had been life and death, Ben would have chanced the thousand-yard shot. But he was in no hurry. He let the man get within seven hundred yards. Ben sighted him in, took a breath, released part of it, and gently squeezed the trigger, allowing the rifle to fire itself.

  The man stood straight up in his boots, grabbed at his chest, then fell forward on his face.

  “Shot high,” Ben muttered. “I was shooting at his stomach.”

  “The son of a bitch!” West yelled.

  “Bastard can shoot,” Texas Red said. He turned to a man standing by the truck. “Is them boys part of West’s bunch?”

  The man lowered his binoculars. “Yeah. I can see that stump-legged bastard sitting in his van.”

  Ben grinned. He called, “Everybody pick up your spare weapon. Stick both of them out the window and pull the trigger. Half of you east, the other half west. Do it!”

  The old dusty littered streets of the ghost town reverberated to the drum of AR-15’s, M-16’s, 30–30’s, and AK-47’s.

  “Holy shit!” West shouted as the windshield of his van exploded under the impact of a very lucky shot from Ben’s rifle. West stared in horror at his driver. The man was slowly slumping down in the seat, a bloody hole in his forehead. Fluid and gray matter oozed out.

  Texas Red did not move from his position by his truck. “Relax,” he called. “Not even Raines is good enough to make a shot at this distance. He’s just showing us he’s got enough firepower behind him to make a stand of it.”

  “Red!” a man called. Red turned at the sound of the voice. “I can’t even raise West’s people at this distance. Radio has really gone to shit.”

  Red nodded. “Hull? You head out to West’s position. Keep them slag piles in front of you. Or whatever them things are. When you reach the end of that last heap, zigzag into the ruins of them buildings. Stay down and you’ll make it. Take off.”

  Hull wasn’t exactly thrilled with his assignment, but he obeyed. He zigzagged and crawled and ran, expecting any moment to feel the hot impact of a slug. When he reached the high-piled waste dumps, he began to breathe a little easier. He stopped to catch his breath and looked around him.

  He grinned, his mouth a mass of rotting teeth. He slipped into a littered alleyway, looked around him, and stepped forward.

  His screams seemed to linger in the air of the ghost town, adding to the ghosts of miners who had fallen to their deaths in the long, seemingly endless pits.

  Hull bounced from side to side in the old shaft, breaking nearly all the bones in his arms, hands, and legs long before he reached the dark bottom of the shaft. Had he been able to see, he would have seen he landed among the bones of others who had taken that one long step into nothingness.

  “Shit!” Texas Red said, as Hull’s screams finally faded away. “Raines has got people scattered around in the town, too. This ain’t gonna be as easy as I first thought.”

  The rattlesnakes that lived deep in the old mine shafts began crawling over Hull’s broken and bleeding body . . .

  “I think we better wait for more men, Red,” an outlaw suggested.

  ... the snakes opened their fanged mouths and struck at the still-warm body, sensing food in their presence. The old mine shafts contained thousands of snakes; they slithered and rattled in the darkness . . .

  “Who the fuck axed you?” Red snarled at the man.

  ... Hull’s body was rapidly turning black from the massive amounts of venom being injected into his dead flesh . . .

  “Jesus!” West whispered. He had banged his still-sore stump getting away from the dead driver. “What was all that hollerin’?”

  ... The rattlers, some of them eight and ten feet long, wound and coiled around Hull’s body. One stuck its head into Hull’s open mouth and sank its fangs into the dead man’s tongue . . .

  “Let’s back off’bout another half-mile, West,” a man suggested. “We’ll cut ’cross country and link up with Texas Red thataway.”

  “Damn good idea,” West said.

  ... Hull’s body was now completely covered by the rattlesnakes. The swelling carcass seemed to expand with new life.

  And the snakes waited for yet more food to fall their way.

  “One group is pullin’ back, Ben!” Jordy called.

  “Good boy. Keep a sharp lookout, kids,” Ben called. He turned to Rani. “We won the first round.”

  “The fight isn’t over yet,” she reminded him.

  “Think positive, dear. Think positive.”

  21

  Ben watched the column headed by West pull back. Shortly afterward, he noticed dust from the north, tracking east, heading toward Texas Red’s location.

  “That screaming a few moments ago?” Rani asked.

  “Someone stepped into one of the old shafts,” Ben told her. “We shortened the odds some the first go-around.”

  “We’re going to need more than that,” Rani said glumly.

  Ben laughed. “Go tell the kids to stand easy but not to leave their posts. We’re going to have a few hours respite.”

  “And then?” she asked.

  “Then all hell breaks loose.” He looked toward the east. “Be interesting to know what those crap-heads are talking about,” he muttered.

  “Jake’s gonna be plenty pissed about this,” West said.

  “Fuck Campo!” Texas Red said. “He don’t spell Jack-shit to me.”

  But West thought, and thought correctly, most of that was pure macho bravado. West had yet to meet anyone who wasn’t, at best, leery of Jake Campo—at worst, terrified of the big outlaw.

  “We gonna have to approach this usin’ some sense,” Texas Red said. “I guess them Rebs of Raines mus
t have fireballed down here to join him. He’s got them scattered around the ruins of the town. Problem is, I don’t know how many of them they is.”

  “I can’t see how that’s possible,” West countered. “Our guys was supposed to find them and box them in, wasn’t they?”

  “Findin’ Raines’ Rebs is one thing,” Texas Red said. “Boxin’ them in is something else.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “We wait and think this thing out.”

  Jake knew what had happened when Red and West were not at the prearranged meeting place. No honor among thieves, he thought.

  He looked up at the sound of engines. Cowboy Vic’s column roared into view.

  “Where’s the rest of the boys?” Vic asked.

  “I would imagine they’ve gone on into that old ghost town just west of the Big Bend,” Campo said. “That’s what you had in mind, too, wasn’t it?”

  “Yep,” Vic said honestly. “I was thinkin’ that whoever got Raines first, could write his own ticket. Wasn’t you thinkin’ the same, Jake?”

  Jake laughed. “Sure was.”

  “Thought so. That’s why we all got down here a little early, wasn’t it?”

  “That’s it. Well, maybe this isn’t such a bad thing after all,” Jake mused aloud.

  “How you figure that?”

  “We’ll just lay back and let West and Texas Red soften up Raines and his bunch. Let them take the heaviest losses. Then we’ll move in and pick up the pieces.”

  “And the glory,” Cowboy Vic said, a trickle of slobber leaking out of one corner of his mouth. “Right?”

  “You got it.” And then I’ll kill you, Campo thought.

  “Good plan,” Cowboy Vic said. And when that’s done, then I’ll kill you, he thought.