Out of the Ashes Read online

  They skirted Richmond, searching the bands on the CB for chatter. The talk was rough: Killin’ niggers and killin’ honkies and lookin’ for pussy.

  “That is so sad,” Jerre commented. “The whole world is in a state of chaos; no telling how many millions of people are dead. We don’t have a government—nothing, and all those ... fools can think of is old hatreds and prejudices and raping and looting.”

  “Those are the bad people, Jerre; they’ve been here all along. They always surface after or during a tragedy. There are, I believe, lots of good people left alive.”

  “Then where are they?”

  “Staying low, keeping out of sight, waiting for the trash and the scum to kill each other off.”

  “I hope they do!” she said, with more heat in her voice than Ben had ever heard.

  “They won’t,” he replied. “Hell, they never have.”

  “You’re sure you want to watch this?” Ben asked her. They stood in a pasture between Hopewell and Richmond. A pasture filled with lowing cattle.

  “Yes,” she said. “If I’m to learn how to survive, I’ve got to know it all. The days of me going into Safeway and getting a ribeye are over. And they won’t be back for a long time, will they, General?”

  Maybe never, he thought. “No, they won’t.” He looked over the herd. “Pick your dinner, Jerre.”

  She pointed.

  “No, that’s a bull. Let’s leave him to do his thing.”

  A cow came up to them, lowing softly, looking at them through soft liquid eyes.

  “Oh, Jesus Christ, Ben! I can’t watch this.”

  Ben cocked his .45 and shot the animal. The cow’s legs buckled and she fell to the ground, quivering and dying.

  “You son of a bitch!” Jerre cursed him.

  When Ben replied, his voice was bland. “Welcome to the Safeway, dear.”

  She stood glaring at him, rage in her eyes.

  “Can you drive a tractor?” Ben asked.

  No reply.

  “All right, then stay here. I’ve got to crank one of those tractors in the shed.”

  “Why?” she asked, her voice shaky.

  “To drag the cow over there,” he pointed. “We’ve got to hoist it up, cut its throat, bleed it, then butcher it.”

  “Gross,” she said. “The absolute, bottomless pits, man!”

  The gross, absolute, bottomless pits left Jerre that evening, while Ben was grilling the thick steaks.

  “Make mine rare, Ben,” she said. “And I mean, really rare. That smells so good!” Then, at his smile, she laughed. “O.K., Ben, so I got my first lesson in what’s in store for me. But, Ben—I’d never seen anything like that before. Lord, I’d sure never seen the inside of a cow.”

  They were grilling the steaks in the back yard of a farmhouse. Here, as in so many homes Ben had stayed in, from Louisiana to Chicago, to the east, then down through the country to Virginia, there were no bodies, no signs of any trouble.

  “Most people haven’t,” he told her. “You’d be surprised at the number of people—grown men and women—who don’t have the vaguest idea how to even cut up a chicken for frying.”

  “I used to love fried chicken and mashed potatoes and gravy. Mamma used to ...” She looked away from Ben, sudden tears in her young eyes.

  Eyes that would, Ben felt, grow much older, very quickly, if she was to survive on the road. “You believe in God, Jerre?”

  She wiped her eyes and nodded. “Yes, sure. But after all this”—she waved a hand—“it makes a person wonder.”

  “Maybe He decided to give a few of us a second chance.”

  “I don’t understand, Ben. If that’s the case, why did He let so many bad people live?”

  “I can’t answer that, babe. I was simply putting forth a theory, that’s all. No proof to back it—none at all.”

  “How will people like me survive, Ben? I mean, you told me you haven’t hunted for sport in years ... yet, all this seems as natural to you as breathing. All that training you had in the service, I guess. But ... people like me, who have never fired a gun, never butchered an animal, how will we make it in a world that has come down to this: dog eat dog and the strongest survive? I’m lucky, and I know it more and more each day. I found you and you’re going to teach me as much as you can. But the others—what about them?”

  “People are tougher than even they suspect,” Ben said. “I think we all have a ... hidden reserve in us; a well of strength that only surfaces in some sort of catastrophe. I also believe that in the long run, good will defeat evil.”

  She thought about that for a time. “You mean, even if we have to return to the caves for a time?”

  “You could say that. Sure. That’s what we’ve done, in fact, in essence.” He grinned to soften the seriousness of her mood. “Dad raised us to be resourceful, but to be kind to those less fortunate, not to be mean to others.” He thought of his brother in Chicago. “Maybe Carl forgot what Dad taught us.”

  He turned the steaks and was lost in his own thoughts. As always, the recorder was on. At first it had spooked Jerre, her every word being recorded. But she had quickly grown accustomed to it. She had said, “I guess all writers are kind of nuts.”

  She brought him back to the present. “Maybe your brother did, Ben. Forget, I mean. But you’re only looking at the bad he is doing, or contemplating doing. I don’t agree with what he’s doing, but every coin has two sides. Look at the other side.

  “Maybe your brother got tired of not being able to walk down the street at night without fear of being mugged, or his wife and daughter being raped. Maybe he got tired of seeing criminals and thugs and street punks being treated like they were something special instead of what they are: just sorry bastards. Maybe he got tired of seeing his taxes go to support criminals instead of their victims. It’s a long list, Ben, and you know it as well as I. Criminals being provided extensive law libraries so they can look for a loophole to get out of prison. I think that’s wrong. I’m no screaming liberal, Ben. I think if you do the crime, you’ve got to be prepared to do the time.

  “We had a professor at school who used to rap with us a lot. He was a history professor, and he really had his shit all together. I hadn’t thought about him until you told me your political philosophy a couple of days ago. You know, when I asked if you were a Democrat or a Republican. You said you were forty percent conservative, thirty percent liberal, ten percent evolutionary anarchist, and twenty percent revolutionary anarchist. That’s just about what Professor Hawkins used to say.

  “He said that someday, in the near future, he believed, if the courts didn’t stop pampering criminals, and return to the public their right to defend themselves, the citizens were going to take matters into their own hands and start dealing with punks in a very swift and hard fashion, and to hell with the judicial system. He said it started back in the late seventies with neighborhood watch programs and citizens’ patrols and what have you. And he said it was a disgrace the courts had let the law-abiding, tax-paying citizens down so rudely, and, he said, so arrogantly.

  “I asked him what he meant by arrogantly, and he said, ‘by putting the rights of criminals ahead of the rights of the law-abiding citizens.’

  “He said a lot more, but I’ve never been able to forget that part.”

  Wise beyond her years, Ben thought.

  “Oh,” she said, “one more thing: he said rich or poor, for our judicial to work, the laws have to be the same. And he said it would probably take a revolution to accomplish that. And he said we had too many laws on the books and too many loopholes.”

  “You agree with that, Jerre?”

  “Yes. I didn’t agree wholeheartedly at the time, but I do now.”

  “I think you’ll make it, Jerre.”

  She looked at him in the light from the lantern, then touched his arm. “Yeah, so do I, Ben.”

  Jerre rose to walk into the kitchen, where she was baking potatoes in the butane stove. Ben watched her go, thinking
: not long, now. A few more days, maybe a week, and she’ll be gone. We’ll find a group of young people and there will be some handsome young fellow, and she’ll go with him.

  And will you be jealous? he asked himself, a half-smile on his lips.

  “Yes,” he spoke softly to the night. “Yes, I will.”

  The first time Ben allowed Jerre to fire the 22 mag, he had stepped off twenty-five feet from a huge cardboard box and told her to blast away at it. She missed the box with all nine rounds.

  “It might help,” Ben said dryly, “if you would open your eyes.”

  “This thing is so loud!”

  “Reload it,” was his command.

  She dropped the pistol three times during the reloading process. Ben said nothing; he let her find her own way. She could do nothing but improve—damned sure couldn’t get any worse. Each time she dropped the weapon Ben picked it up, checking for barrel blockage. What he did not need was a young lady with some fingers blown off. Or a hand.

  Jerre practiced for an hour the first day. By the end of that time, she could hit the box five out of nine times.

  “It’s hopeless,” she said, disappointment on her face.

  “I think you did very well. You’ll get better.”

  They drove through the outskirts of Petersburg. And it was there Ben found the first organization geared toward rebuilding. But neither Ben nor Jerre wanted any part of this group. The leader was a Fundamentalist preacher (Ben didn’t ask of what) who reminded Ben of a certain member of the old Moral Majority (title self-proclaimed). This one was too slick, too glib, too quick with a smile—an answer for everything.

  “That guy makes my skin crawl,” Jerre observed. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Although many members of the group had heard of Ben, and some actually had begged him to stay, the preacher’s protestations over Ben’s leaving were weak, spoken without much sincerity. Ben pegged him as a man who would be king, and wanted no interference from the outside.

  “He was afraid of you, Ben,” Jerre said.

  “He won’t last long,” Ben predicted. They were heading southeast on U.S. Route 460, toward Norfolk—or what was left of it. Saboteurs had just about destroyed the city. “There will be a few dimwits who’ll follow him to the end, but most of those people back there are too intelligent to listen to his line of bullshit for very long.”

  “He sounds stupid,” Jerre said with the blunt honesty of the young. “And I don’t think he’s very sincere. To tell you the truth, I think he’s an asshole.”

  Ben laughed at her.

  They drove as close to the Norfolk/Portsmouth/Virginia Beach area as Ben felt was safe. Smoke still clung over the area, smarting their eyes. They pulled back a few more miles and spent the night in a motel.

  “Why is it,” Jerre asked, “that most of the bad people seem to be located ... concentrated, I guess, in the cities, the larger places?”

  Interesting question, Ben thought. But he hedged it, saying only, “Remember that when you strike out on your own.”

  “Don’t worry.” She smiled at him over their dinner of C-ration. “I have vivid memories of Wheeling.”

  “And the four-minute mile.”

  “And fifty peckers,” she capped it.

  They made love slowly that night, very gently, both of them sensing their time together was growing short. Ben was steeling himself for the time Jerre would leave him. He had grown more than fond of Jerre, and though he tried to keep that from her, he sensed she knew.

  They backtracked to Suffolk and then headed south, taking highway 32 to Edenton. Ben stopped at every town along the way, looking for survivors ... but he was stalling and knew it. And worse, he felt Jerre knew it.

  During those last days, she sat very close to him most of the time, her left hand resting on his thigh. She spoke very little as they traveled through North Carolina, through the dead and silently littered towns. They watched the packs of dogs slink and snarl at their arrival and departure. They drove over to the coast and down to Nags Head.

  Ben had picked up a Polaroid and had made a hundred pictures of her, and she of him. They walked the beach and picked up bits of driftwood and shell. Ben sensed she had something to tell him, but he did not push her. She would tell him in her own time.

  They spent a week on the beach, Ben teaching her what he could of survival. She became a fair shot with the pistol, could pitch a tent and properly ditch it, build a fire and cook over it. But Ben did not have the time to teach her, to instill in her, the sixth sense of knowing when danger approached, and who to trust. And how could he teach her, in so short a time, to shoot first and ask questions later? That took learning the hard way. Ben hoped she would make it.

  One morning Ben awoke to find her gone from his side. He called for her, and she quickly stepped back into the cottage. She looked at him, her eyes serious.

  “Let’s pack it up, Ben. Head west. O.K.?”

  “O.K., babe. How far west and any particular reason for that direction?”

  She nodded. “Time to level with you, General.” She tried a smile that didn’t make it. “I heard on the road that kids were going to gather at the university at Chapel Hill the first and second weeks of November. The word was passed up and down the line. The reason ... ? Ben, I don’t want to hurt your feelings, and please don’t take this the wrong way, but—”

  “But the adults screwed up the world and maybe you young people can do better this time around,” Ben finished it for her.

  “You’re a wise man, Ben Raines.”

  “I’m a survivor, Jerre.”

  “Am I, Ben?”

  “I think you’ll make it, babe.”

  Ben skirted Raleigh and they spent their last night together at Pittsboro, a few miles south of Chapel Hill. They made love slowly and then she cried herself to sleep, lying in his arms.

  In the early morning hours, just before dawn, Ben felt her slip from his side and dress quietly in the darkened house. She left a note on her pillow and softly kissed him on the cheek. He pretended to be asleep. Jerre opened the door and looked back at him; then she stepped quietly out of his life, closing the door behind her. He listened to the sound of her footsteps fade.

  Ben rose from his blankets to stand by the window. He looked out into the dim light and watched her walk up the highway, toward the gathering of hopeful young people. As they had approached the small town, Ben had seen more and more young people, all heading for Chapel Hill.

  They had smiled and waved at Jerre. They had flatly ignored Ben.

  When Jerre was gone from his sight, Ben turned on the battery-operated lantern and picked up the note she had left.

  Dear Ben,

  I’ll make this short, ’cause if I try to write too much I’ll just tear it up and stay with you, and I think that would be bad for both of us—at this time. Maybe what I’m doing is foolish. I don’t know. But I feel it’s something I have to do. The world is in such a mess, I have to try to do something to help fix it. Maybe the young can. I don’t know. In my heart I kind of doubt it, but we have to try—right?

  The mood I get from the kids I’ve talked with is they blame the adults for the mess we’re in. I don’t think that is entirely fair, personally. You’re a good man, and there must be others like you. But give us a chance, huh?

  I don’t know what my feelings are toward you, Ben. I like you a whole lot and I think I probably love you a little bit. That’s a joke—I think I probably love you a whole lot. That’s one of the reasons I’ve got to split. There are other reasons, of course, but my feelings toward you are right up there at the top.

  You’ve got places to go and things to do before you find yourself—your goal, preset, I believe—and start to do great things. And you will, Ben. You will.

  I hope I see you again, General.

  Jerre

  Ben carefully folded the note and put it in a waterproof pouch where he carried other precious, silent memories: a picture of his mother and fat
her, his brothers and sisters, a girl he had once loved. And now, Jerre. He put in the pictures of Jerre with her note and closed the flap, securing it.

  He sat on the edge of the bed for a time, the scent of her still in the air, on the pillowcase, the sheets.

  “Good-by, Jerre,” Ben said aloud.

  He packed his gear and pulled out. Had he turned north, instead of south, he would have found her sitting at the side of the road, crying, looking down the empty road. Looking south.

  TEN

  Ben was maudlin for a time, his thoughts moody, filled with regret and self-pity. But as he drove, his mood began to lift as he realized Jerre had been right in her young wisdom: she needed to be with her own kind, her own age—at least for a time. He wished the young people well, but did not believe they would accomplish a thing. Except to get themselves killed. Back in 1960, when Ben was sixteen years old, he had believed in Camelot. But the years of combat and of seeing the mute silence of the dead and the screaming of the wounded and the starvation of the peoples in parts of Africa had convinced him that only the toughest survive—there is not, there was not such a place as Camelot.

  But, he thought, forcing a grin, let the young people try; maybe they can build a better world from out of the ashes. God knows the last two generations sure fucked this one up.

  He drove down to Sanford and angled over until he linked up with the interstate. The on-ramp was blocked, so Ben dropped the truck into four-wheel drive and drove until he found a place where he believed he could get on the highway. He drove down to Dillon and there he spent the rest of the day practicing with the M-10 and getting the feel of the 9-mm pistol. Ben concluded the little SMG did not have the knockdown power of the heavy old Thompson, or the range, but it was lighter and easier to handle. He elected to stay with it.

  The barrel extension/silencer increased the range a few yards—about sixty-five yards max—and made the weapon easier to control, for the padded extension/ silencer served much as a rifle fore-end. Without it, the Ingram made a hell of a racket. Even with it, it sounded like a fast-quacking duck with a speech impediment.