Chaos in the Ashes Read online

  “Right, boss.” But she did not immediately turn to the radio.

  Ben looked over at Lamar. “Go ahead, Lamar. Say it.”

  “Say what? What do you want me to say, Ben? Hell, I know what we’re up against. We can’t go into every community in twenty or more states and prop people up, knowing they’re going to fall down as soon as we leave. At the rate we’re going it would take us years, it would exhaust our own resources, and in the end, accomplish nothing. Right now, we’ve covered only half of one state and I can clearly see the so-called ‘healing process’ is not going to work. The plan looked very good on paper. It just didn’t work in the field.” He fell silent and sipped his whiskey and water.

  “So far,” Ben said.

  “What do you mean, Father?” Buddy asked. “What are you thinking?”

  “At first light, round up all the survivors that are milling around waiting for us to do everything for them. Round them up at gunpoint and bring them here. I don’t know how else to do this.”

  “What are you going to do, Ben?” Chase was sitting up straight, his whiskey and water forgotten. “Shoot them?”

  “No,” Ben said with a smile. “But they might think that’s what I’m going to do.”

  “Seven-thousand-nine-hundred-forty-two men, women, and children,” Beth said, reading from a clipboard.

  “How many children under the age of thirteen?” Ben asked.

  “Seven-hundred-fifty-two.”

  “They have been separated from their parents?”

  “Right, boss. They’re being served a hot breakfast as we speak.”

  “PA system working?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Tools and cleaning equipment rounded up?”

  “Right, boss,” Cooper said. “Rebels worked all night sifting through the rubble. We’ve got hammers and boxes of nails and brooms and handsaws and so forth. All stacked and ready to go.”

  Janet House-Lewiston stood with the three reporters, off to one side, all of them looking at Ben. “What is that man going to do?” she whispered.

  “Whatever it is,” Cassie said. “You can bet he’s going to be uncommonly blunt about it.”

  Ben walked over to the raised platform and climbed up, walking over to the microphone. He tapped the mic and the sound popped out of the huge outdoor speakers. He looked down into the hundreds of faces, most of them registering undisguised fear. He said, “You people are the laziest, most irresponsible and worthless pack of assholes I have ever seen.” His voice boomed out over the heads of the crowd.

  The crowd gasped in shock and so did Janet. Nils, Cassie, and Frank smiled.

  “I know from reading the questionnaires you filled out that most of you men and women have at least a high school education, many of you have some college and about twenty percent of you are college graduates. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves.” Ben’s voice was thick with scorn. “You’re behaving like worthless rabble. Well, that is about to come to a halt. Right now.” He looked down at the clipboard. “Mr. Scott Turner. Front and center. Right now! Move it, goddammit!”

  A man with a very frightened look on his face pushed through the crowd and stood in front of the platform.

  Ben looked down at him. “You stand right there, mister. And don’t you move.” Ben called out twenty more names, men and women. When that group had gathered in front of the platform, Ben said, “Before the Great War and during the first rebuilding process afterward, you men and women were successful in your chosen fields. You cover the spectrum. Businessmen and women, contractors, plumbers, electricians—you twenty-one people cover the whole nine yards. You did well at your chosen professions, but now you just want to give up and roll over. Well, you’re not going to do that. I’m not going to let you because the nation needs you. You, Mr. Turner, are now the leader of this pack of pricks and pussies. You and these other men and women I’ve chosen are going to oversee the rebuilding and setting up of a very clean and prosperous and smooth-running community. Do you know why you’re going to do that?”

  The men and women looked up at him and shook their heads.

  “Because if you don’t, I’m going to come back and shoot every goddamn one of you, that’s why!”

  “Oh, my God!” Janet hissed. “He can’t mean that!”

  “He means it,” Nils whispered, hiding his smile.

  “And while your bodies are cooling on the ground,” Ben continued, “I’ll pick twenty or so others and see what they can do. And if they fuck up, I’ll shoot them!” he roared, the speakers rattling.

  All the men and women in the huge crowd were scared, and made no attempt to hide it.

  “We’re going to stick around here for a week or so,” Ben said. “But we won’t be doing the work, you people will. We’ll just supervise the operation. This community is going to shine. It’s going to be an example. This litter and rubble is going to be picked up, hauled off, and disposed of properly. Homes are going to be swept out and floors mopped until they shine like a barracks before inspection—”

  “Fuck you!” a man shouted from the crowd. He pushed his way through to stand in front of the raised platform. “You can’t make me do a goddamn thing I don’t want to do. You can take your goddamn orders and stick ’em up your goddamn ass, you goddamn tin soldier son-of-a-bitch!”

  Ben shot him.

  Coldly, dispassionately, and without any visible sign of emotion, Ben shot him between the eyes.

  “Oh, my God!” Janet whispered in shock. “I can’t believe I’m witnessing this.”

  “I can,” Frank Service said. “This nation’s future is at stake. And Ben Raines knows it.”

  Ben held the pistol at his side. “Anybody else?” He spoke calmly into the microphone.

  No one in the crowd uttered a sound or made a move.

  “Get to work,” Ben said. “Right now!”

  EIGHTEEN

  “Just as busy as a bunch of little bees,” Ben remarked, as he drove around the suburbs of the city. “The place is beginning to look like something again.”

  “I can’t believe you shot that man, Ben,” Lamar said. “I was there, I saw it, but I can’t believe it.”

  “You still don’t get it, do you, Lamar?” Ben questioned.

  “What is it I’m supposed to get, Raines?”

  “Fear, Lamar. Pure and simple fear. That’s what these people were waiting on—fear. That’s what the liberals conditioned a certain number of Americans to live under. Fear. Fear of the government. If you don’t pay your taxes, we’ll seize your property or put you in jail, or both. If you don’t toe the line, no matter how petty and ridiculous the law, we’ll punish you. We—the government—are your masters. You don’t have enough sense to run your own lives, so we’ll do it for you. They made rules and regulations and forms so complex, complicated, and so filled with gobbledy gook, about half of the American people caved in and became nothing more than puppets. The fucking liberals cut the heart and the guts out of millions of people. They based their government on fear. I just used that still-lingering fear to get the people back to work. That man I shot may have been a good man, a decent man. And I’m sure the Almighty will make me pay for what I did . . . among other sins too numerous to mention. But I will put this nation back together again.

  “The SUSA will survive and prosper and grow powerful under Rebel rule. Up here, these frightened little rabbits now cleaning up the streets and homes will, eventually, get some steel in their backbones and start once again legislating themselves into a maze of rules and regulations and complexities, because that’s the way the fucking liberal government of the past conditioned them to live. And in their own way, they will prosper. They’ll bog themselves down building prisons and halfway houses and public housing and basketball courts for worthless goddamn punks, and tax themselves to the breaking point trying to be all things to all people all the time. In a few years, they’ll have bars on their windows and twenty-nine locks on their doors, and car alarms and home se
curity systems and they’ll piss and moan about the crime rate and will never understand that it’s all their fault. But . . . that’s the way they want to live, Lamar. So be it. I’ll help them return to that.”

  Lamar stared at Ben for a full minute. Then he said, “Well, I’ll just be goddamned!”

  * * *

  The Rebels pulled out one week after Ben laid down his ultimatum to the people. During that week, blocks and blocks of the suburbs had been transformed into clean streets and neat homes. Water and electricity had not yet been restored, but that wasn’t far off.

  Ben met one last time with Scott Turner and the group. The men and women were neatly dressed and had a lot of their former pride back. “You’re on your own now,” Ben told them. “It’s doubtful I’ll be back, but Rebel patrols will be checking in until the Midwest is brought back from the ashes. After that, what kind of government you install is up to you. But I have a pretty good idea what it will be.”

  “You don’t think much of us, do you, General?” a woman asked.

  Ben shook his head. “I’ll pass on that question, lady, since it’s doubtful our paths will ever cross again. Maybe you folks were knocked down so hard, twice in a row, you forgot how to get up on your own. But you’re up now. And whether you stay up or go down for the count is now entirely in your hands. You’d better form up some sort of home guard for defense, and appoint people as peace officers. I’m not ordering you to do that. It’s just a suggestion. I’m not going to waste my breath telling you about letting criminals get the upper hand or how to deal with them. That’s up to you people now. Goodbye and good luck.” Ben walked out of the newly cleaned up and repainted community building. “Mount up!” he hollered. “We’re outta here!”

  And that was the way the Rebels began ramming some steel into the backbone of a twice demoralized American populace. From the Mississippi River east to the Atlantic Ocean, the Rebels rolled into community after community and, using threats, fear, coercion and intimidation, they started the long and tedious job of propping up America . . . one more time.

  Ben took his people west and crossed the Illinois River, heading for Quincy, spending a week there. Then he turned to the northeast and headed for Peoria. Over to Galesburg and up to Moline. By this time the weather had turned bitterly cold. The Rebels began inspecting each house they came to, looking for blankets and clothing. When they were found, they were carefully laundered and given to the people. The Rebels rounded up cattle and hogs and sheep. They repaired fences and chicken coops. By the first of the new year, the people they were helping got into the spirit of the thing and began struggling to stand on their own two feet before the Rebels arrived. No one likes to be browbeaten and threatened and belittled.

  “By God, Ben, it’s working,” Nick Stafford, commander of 18 Batt radioed from the East Coast.

  “It was a desperation move on my part, Nick,” Ben said. “I just didn’t know what else to do. If this had failed, I was going to turn us around and head on back to the SUSA.”

  On the fifteenth of January, a major winter storm slammed into the nation and Ben ordered everybody to shut it down and wait it out. Ben and his 1 Batt were on the outskirts of Rockford, ready for a fight, but Ray Brown and his gang had pulled out, leaving behind them a dead city—gutted, looted, destroyed and utterly devoid of people.

  “Simon Border has probably given them sanctuary,” Ben said.

  “I thought he was such a fine, upstanding Christian person,” Beth remarked, a smile playing at her lips.

  “Simon Border is a prick,” Ben said. “He’s playing both ends against the middle. He’s shaken hands with the devil in an attempt to get rid of us.”

  “Ray Brown and all the other gang leaders just might decide to turn on him,” Cooper said.

  “They might,” Ben agreed. “But not for a while. I suspect that Simon has justified what he’s doing by telling his followers he’s using mercenaries against us. Any means to an end. Come the spring, we’ll have a real fight on our hands. And you can all get ready for it.”

  “But won’t the people we’ve helped pitch in to help us when push comes to shove?” Anna questioned.

  “I doubt it,” Ben said. “Oh, some of them will, sure. But not the majority. We’re like the gunfighters of the Old West, gang. It’s all right for us to come in and clean up the town, but once the killing is done, the outlaws buried or run out, and the streets safe, the people don’t want us around. We give them a guilty conscience.”

  Anna, now sixteen (or maybe seventeen, she wasn’t sure), shook her head and walked off, muttering about people in general and certain types of people in particular.

  The weather had brought the Rebel push to an abrupt halt, trapping Lamar Chase with Ben’s 1 Batt in Northern Illinois, just a few miles south of the Wisconsin border. The old roads were impassable and were going to remain that way until the storm broke and the weather warmed.

  When Ben started studying aerial recon maps of the ruins of Chicago, his team knew playtime was over and they were about to get down to the serious business of war.

  What was left of Chicago was under the control of gangs and creeps. For several years, the gangs and the creeps had been ranging out of the city, into the countryside, looting and pillaging and kidnapping victims for slavery or whoredom . . . or for dinner.

  Ben alerted Ike’s 2 Batt and Dan’s 3 Batt to get ready to move against the thugs and the creeps as soon as the weather warmed. The runways were cleared at Rock-ford’s airport and planes began coming in, bringing supplies for a major push.

  Ike’s people began clearing the main runway at an old airport just south of Gary, Indiana and the transports came roaring in. Dan began moving his people across the line to a position south and west of the city and began receiving supplies at an airport there.

  In Chicago, the thugs and punks and creeps geared up for a fight.

  Buddy pulled his 8 Batt in and positioned them west of the city on the old East/West Tollway.

  Lamar Chase began stockpiling medical supplies.

  The winter storm abated, the sun broke through, and the temperature warmed, melting the ice and snow. The highways were clear.

  “Chicago is a festering boil,” Ben said. “And we’re going to lance it.”

  BOOK TWO

  Revolutions are not made; they come. A revolution is as natural a growth as an oak. It comes out of the past. Its foundations are laid far back.

  - Wendell Phillips

  ONE

  “There are people living all over what is left of the suburbs,” Scouts reported to Ben. “But they’re living there of their own free will. They’ve aligned themselves with the gangs and the creeps.”

  Ben looked up at the sky. Clear blue with not a cloud to be seen. The temperature was in the low forties. “Order the planes and the gunships in, Corrie.”

  Over the years, the Rebels had worked this out to perfection. Artillery and planes and gunships would hammer the target for hours, sometimes days, reducing everything to burning, smoking rubble. Then the ground troops would move in, slowly searching every pile of rubble. And they rarely took prisoners. The enemy had been warned many, many times; surrender or die. Once the Rebels entered a free-fire zone, they would shoot on sight.

  It took the Rebels four weeks to clear the ruins of Chicago of most creepies, gangs, and other assorted crud. After talking with what few prisoners they took, Rebel estimates were that they had cleared perhaps ninety percent of the criminals who had occupied the ruins of the once great city.

  The ten percent remaining were hiding amid the rubble and the ruins. They would probably continue their way of life, preying on the innocent, but the backbone of the gangs was broken, with the heads chopped off.

  The Rebels made plans to move on.

  “Wisconsin,” Beth read from a worn old tourist guide she had found somewhere, “comprises just over fifty-six thousand square miles. Before the Great War, it had a population of five million.”

  “T
hank you, Beth,” Cooper said. “I really needed that information.”

  “Talk to me, Beth,” Jersey told her. “Cooper’s level of comprehension stops at Mickey Mouse.”

  Ben was sitting at a portable desk, going over a list of supplies they would need before they shoved off. He paused, listening to his team talk.

  “Did you ever get to see any of the Disney parks, Jersey?” Corrie asked.

  “Only the ruins,” she replied. “You?”

  “Somebody took me to one when I was real little,” Corrie said. “But I can just vaguely remember it. I can’t even remember who took me.”

  “I remember just after the Great War,” Jersey recalled, “gas got my whole family. I wandered around for about a week, just looking at all the dead bodies. Then I came up to the casino on the reservation. Huge place. It was all deserted, except for the dead. I must have gone into shock. For a long time after that, months, things are just a blur. How in the hell I wound up two states away is still a mystery to me.”

  Many of the younger Rebels had similar stories; only vague memories of wandering, hiding from gangs, fighting for survival after the bombs and the deadly gas covered the land.

  “There is an airport here in Southern Wisconsin large enough to handle our transports,” Ben said, standing up. “Let’s get moving.”

  Ben left Ike and Dan to sift through the ruins of Milwaukee and clear it of gangs. He took his 1 Batt and moved west, into the southern part of Wisconsin. Almost in the geographical center of the state, about twenty miles north of the Illinois state line, Ben and his people began getting the main runway in shape to receive the transport planes. About five hundred people were living in and around the town that once boasted a population of some fifteen thousand. Many of them did not receive the Rebels with welcoming arms.