Survivor (The Ashes Book 36) Read online

  In addition to the AK-47, Jim also had an old-fashioned Thompson submachine, or tommy gun, which Ray had explained was the “weapon of choice of gangsters,” but eventually it became great and popular when modified for use in World War II, a formidable weapon that was not that easy to handle but could fire six hundred rounds a minute. Jim knew this was a favorite of General Raines and Jim had used it to dispatch two of four marauders he met while he was with Raines.

  Above all, Jim liked the Glock handgun, which was light, 9mm, and held sixteen shots. He had heard the story of why the New York City Police Department carried these pistols—because of a death. One NYPD officer had been in a Shootout with a perp and the cop was using a six-shot .38 while the bad guy was using a 9mm. When the bad guy knew that the cop had used up all his ammunition—he’d counted six shots—he just walked up and put two bullets in the twenty-three-year-old cop’s head—and had five left in the clip.

  Jim withdrew a cigarette paper from his jacket pocket, folded it like a little trough with his fingers, then used the other hand to sprinkle on and tamp down some Prince Albert tobacco. He rolled the cigarette closed, licked it, popped it in his mouth, and lit it with a Zippo lighter.

  He took a deep drag and focused inward. He smiled. For a moment he got an image that was straight out of a movie. A wonderful movie. He could see himself, knee deep in rapidly running water that was so clear that he could see the pebble-covered creek bed almost as clearly as if the water wasn’t there, and then flicking his wrist to make a fly sail out on the end of his fishing line, there to make a little splash and wait for one of the fat trout that, hopefully, would get a hankering for the fly bobbing above him on the silvery water.

  He knew he could he could live indefinitely in the wild, and in harmony with everything from bears to marmots. His grandfather had once said, “Jimmy boy, you know the wild so well I sometimes think you were born part wolf.”

  The relatively narrow road was flanked by evergreens, and Jim knew that this was an ideal situation. The trees provided great cover though he knew that many parts of Wyoming, which he had traveled through extensively while still living in Idaho, were not forested. Besides its spectacular mountain ranges, much of it was desert, and most of it was covered with various kinds of sagebrush, which provided zero cover when you were traveling by vehicle, particularly a camouflage-painted HumVee.

  His route was typical backcountry road, mile after mile of forest; occasionally he could see a house through the veil of trees. So far, he thought, so good. His mood, he sensed, had gotten just a little better. It wasn’t a square dance on Saturday night in Jaynesville but it was better than it had been.

  Most of the road was straight, but of course some was curved, and as he came around one curve he got a surprise that put him on full alert.

  The road was blocked by a barricade. It looked like a steel I-beam had been placed across the road, the ends of the beams housed in some sort of sawhorse arrangement about four feet above the ground. But that wasn’t the only thing barring passing. There were six men all wearing khaki uniforms, all wearing the same short beards, albeit different colors, and red berets. And armed to the teeth. Four of the men looked like they had shotguns, and two Kalashnikovs. They also had holstered handguns and belts of grenades.

  Jim slowed the HumVee and then stopped but kept the engine idling. Just like he had done when he was hunting game, he started to calculate what he would do if they would, in effect, charge—started to fire on him. There wasn’t much he could do. The firepower they were toting would make Swiss cheese of the HumVee, and him, in short order and maybe turn it into a fireball, this thanks to the gas cans he had stored in back.

  And if he wanted to make his butt scarce, he couldn’t do that either. There was no room to turn. If he wanted to move out, all he could do was throw it in reverse and put the pedal to the metal.

  Then two of the men, both muscular, maybe in their thirties, one tall, the other short, starting walking toward him, each carrying his gun at port arms. They did not seem threatening, but one never knew. Jim pulled the Glock, which was on the passenger seat in a holster, flicked the holster out of sight near Reb, and pushed the gun under his right thigh. Then a plan hit him. He was very conscious that he had a loaded, thirty-cartridge AK-47 under his seat. If the men were hostile and drew down on him he would shoot first one and then the other in the head, and bolt out of the Hummer, using it for cover, hopefully before the other four men made mincemeat of him with their weapons.

  Then something glittering on their chests caught Jim’s eye. He saw something he hadn’t noticed because of the grenades. Each had silver medallions held by silver chains hanging from their necks. The medallions were maybe three inches in diameter, and inside the circular edge was a cross, the ages-old symbol of Jesus Christ, a modern depiction of the crucifixion.

  The tall man looked at Jim with narrow blue eyes.

  “What do you want here?” the man demanded.

  “Just passing through,” Jim replied. “Heading east.”

  The man’s eyes narrowed to the point where they were just about slits. Jim tried to read what was in them, but couldn’t. The other man’s hazel eyes were blank.

  “Everything east of here,” Slit Eyes said, “is known as the Zone, stranger. It’s no-man’s land.”

  “Why is this so special?”

  The shorter man stepped forward.

  “Are you a Christian?”

  That was, Jim thought, none of their business. But if he didn’t answer he didn’t know if it would lead to violence. He decided to answer, but he also wondered if he should tell the man that he was born Catholic though, in truth, he hadn’t been to Mass or confession in more years than he could recall. Churches were few and far between in Idaho’s wilderness. Still, he felt that he and his family had lived a Christian life. But something inside would not let him go into all this. His attitude was accommodating—to a point.

  “I believe in God, yes. Why do you ask?”

  “Them folks in the Zone—that’s what we call it—don’t,” the man replied.

  Jim stared at the man for a moment, then shrugged, and said quietly, “Well, so what?”

  The man nodded slowly, his eyebrows arched a little.

  “You’ll find out, fella,” he said. “You go in there and you’ll sure find out. We’re suggesting you don’t.”

  “I’ll be okay,” Jim said.

  The man backed away, apparently a signal that Jim would be allowed to pass.

  “Go on,” the man said. “Just don’t say we didn’t warn you.”

  The man waved and the two of the other four men went over and swung the big I-beam out of the way.

  Jim put the HumVee in gear and drove forward slowly, very conscious of the Glock under his haunch. As he passed the other men, he noticed their expressions. They were looking at him as if he were a steer going into a slaughterhouse. And then, twenty or so yards beyond them, he glanced in the rearview mirror still wary that this might be some sort of trick, that they were going to open up on him. But he saw only one action: one of the men was making the sign of the cross.

  TWO

  The so-called Zone did not seem dangerous to Jim. It was very ordinary. Just mile after mile of evergreen forest, an occasional home spotted through the trees, and a few times some animals. Once he had seen an elk, another time a buck deer, and another—the treat of the ride so far—a black bear sow and two teddy-bear-size cubs trailing after her. And once he had a close call—or the skunk did—when Jim narrowly missed turning it into roadkill which he did not need, with what he had put his nose through already.

  Despite the lack of an open threat, Jim stayed alert. He was sure that the medallion men on the barricade were not telling him that the Zone was dangerous as a joke. Jim knew that there was always the possibility—and it could be a strong possibility—of being attacked. He knew this was the time of the predator, because when people were down was when predators emerged. They preyed on the sick
, the young, the old, the helpless. So, too, men. They would much rather attack someone who was defenseless than someone who was not. Such people always struck Jim as not only evil, but shortsighted, just plain stupid. He had always been raised to believe that far and away the most important person in anyone’s life was the one looking back at you from a mirror, and when you prey on the helpless, what did that make you? Of course people like that had a very simple solution to self-image. They never looked in the mirror.

  But Jim also knew something else. That it was in bad times that always produced the best people, like Mother Teresa, who would work the streets of Calcutta where the dead lay out in the open even before the plague came, ministering to the dead and dying, the forlorn and forgotten. Or the doctor who would stand in some godforsaken place in Africa and use himself as a guinea pig for an experimental serum, or a guy like his brother Ray who had his whole life ahead of him but would die jumping on a grenade so others could live.

  Jim swallowed hard. God, he missed Ray. He loved him and idolized him and he didn’t need a psychiatrist to tell him that Ray was his surrogate father. He remembered that one of Ray’s favorite TV shows was a very old one called Superman, where the father, as the planet dies around him, saves his son, and before he goes he tell him: “And all that I have is in you.”

  Jim swallowed again. So it was with him and Ray. Jim had modeled his life after him—except for the war part—and knew that he would always be with him no matter what he did or where he went. Ray had been a model for the way you should live your life. That was his gift to his young brother, Jim, and it was as good as gifts get. And Jim hoped, someday, that he could pass on what was in him to his own son.

  Despite his awareness of potential danger, Jim relaxed more and more as the miles piled up. Still, part of him remained alert, a quiet but observant eye inside him always scanning for potentially hazardous situations. Maybe, he thought, smiling, he was part wolf or some other animal. That’s how they survived: by staying alert always.

  While there was no one to keep him company on his journey, he would occasionally have a “conversation” with Reb, who would invariably respond to his name by raising his head and wagging his tail.

  “So how you doing, Reb? You’re lucky. Lucky that I found you.” Jim smiled. “A lucky dog.”

  But Jim knew that he was lucky too. Dogs were wonderful creatures. As a trapper he once knew in Idaho had put it, “God was having a real good day when He made the dog.” Indeed, Jim had often thought that the world would be a much better place if people acted more like dogs and horses, another animal favorite of Jim’s. (Though, in truth, horses were not that bright. In fact when asked if they were smart, his grandfather had a standard answer: “If you were that big and that beautiful, would you spend your entire day eating grass?”) If you treated a dog or a horse a certain way, you could be sure that was the way it would treat you back. Not people. You could treat people as if they were the queen of Sheba and they would stab you in the back.

  At one point, Jim pulled off the road onto the shoulder to stretch, take a leak, top off the gas tank by emptying two of the five-gallon gas cans into it. As he did, he thought again that he did not like carrying this much gas in the vehicle. It made him, in effect, a mobile bomb, but it was either that, at this point, or start walking. And the HumVee had too much going for it to make him want to look for another vehicle, which, he was sure, he could get. Many had been abandoned. Indeed, half of Nevada was now a used car lot. Jim smiled: with nothing down required, now or later!

  Once back in the cab, the kinks gone, he rolled a cigarette, lit up, took a couple of drags, and was on his way again.

  Besides the occasional animal, Jim also had the flora and fauna itself to view.

  It was early June and the forest was in full flower, so he did not see as much as he would if it were another season. But the animals he had seen reminded him—if he needed that—that no animal, as far as anyone could tell, had come down with the plague. That gave him hope. More than that, if he were a medical investigator he would start looking into what kept animals well to try to determine what made people sick.

  Occasionally, too, the forest would clear a little and he could see mountains and the big sky. As many times as he had seen the mountains, they still moved him. In fact, his favorite song was “America the Beautiful.” He loved the words. “Oh, beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, for purple mountain majesties.”

  “There’s only one thing more beautiful than the mountains,” Ray had said, “and that’s a beautiful woman.”

  That, Jim thought, was hard to argue with. And someday he hoped to be able to see if Ray was right!

  Every now and then, Jim would also see narrow dirt roads leading off the road he was on to somewhere, either a house or nowhere, and he would be tempted just to follow it to God knew where. But he resisted the urge. The width of the HumVee said no. The roads were narrow and the HumVee was twelve feet wide. There might not be a turnaround and he did not relish having to back out.

  What he did not see, aside from marauders or whatever this danger was, was more dead people. He was grateful. Christ, he thought. It must be a bitch to be a coroner. That’s all these guys and gals ever saw all the time: dead people. After awhile it had to get to you. Indeed, he had heard on the radio once that reporters who were involved in death scenes suffered posttraumatic stress syndrome, the problem first discovered in soldiers who fought in Vietnam.

  And, thinking of death, what about the plague? What hope, ultimately, could humanity have if the plague wasn’t brought under control? Or, maybe, it would go away by itself. That’s what happened to the one in the fourteenth century. This one would too, though Jim knew that a far better answer would be to cure it through scientific means. Who wanted to be sitting on what, in effect, was a plague bomb that might go off again at any moment?

  One thing Jim knew, he was immune. In some of the towns he had passed through, the bodies were everywhere. There was ample opportunity for him to come down with the disease. If he hadn’t by now, he wasn’t going to.

  At another point along his journey, Jim stopped again, but this time for Reb to do his business. And as he watched, Jim thought again how well trained Reb was. Training was so important . . . so important . . .

  Abruptly, Jim remembered a friend of his named Luke McGovern and his German shepherd, who was named Cap. People used to laugh at how hard Luke worked to train Cap, but one day it paid off handsomely—by saving the dog’s life. Luke had gone camping. He had let Cap run free—it was an unrestricted area—and at one point Cap wandered across a fairly well traveled road while Luke stayed at the other side at the camp.

  It all happened in an instant. Luke was looking at some fishing gear and he glanced up to see Cap starting to run back toward his camp, maybe three yards from the edge of the road; and speeding down the road, not ten yards away, was a pickup truck. They were sure to collide, but in that instant Luke yelled the command that he had taught over and over and over again to Cap: “Down!” The dog dropped like a stone and the pickup went whizzing by, missing him by a foot.

  Like the rest of the road he had traveled, most of it was straight, but there were some curves and he was coming around one when he got another surprise. Directly to his right was a two-story white building, on the side of which someone had painted—in huge red letters two stories high—god is dead.

  The sign was stark. Not only were the words big, but the paint had run down from the letters, making it look as if they were bleeding.

  And the sign writer or writers made sure that people would see the sign. All the evergreens that were in front of the side of the building and would have at least partially blocked the view had been sawn down, and lay in a jumble on the ground.

  The building, Jim saw, looked like it had housed a business. In the front was a plate-glass window at street level—though it was knocked in—and a framework jutting out over a door that had held a sign.

  T
here was also a road that ran past the building on the side where the sign was. This, he thought, was probably the road that customers used to get whatever the building sold; there was a packed-dirt parking area in front of the building. And across the road, to his left, there was a modest home.

  Jim, Glock in his pocket, got out of the HumVee, still keeping it running, and took a few steps toward the building. The people who ran whatever was in the building, he thought, probably lived in the house.

  Jim reflected on the words again: God is dead? he thought. I don’t think so.

  Jim thought of what the medallion people back at the barricade had said to him, implying that there were people in “the Zone” who would not take kindly to someone who believed in God—like Jim.

  Jim took out paper and the tobacco and rolled a cigarette, licked it closed, and lit up. He took a few more steps toward the sign and stopped and looked up, thinking as he smoked.

  The thing about the sign, he thought, was that it was filled with hatred. People who would take that long to clear the area and deface a building with what was really a sacrilegious sign like that had a lot of hatred in their heart. And what could he infer from it if they truly believed it? True, he had not been that religious, but a world without God in it and at the end of it all was a world that was guaranteed to be in chaos, simply because there were no laws. It was Moses, Jim thought, who brought the Ten Commandments down from the mountain, but it was God who had handed them to him.

  “Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, thou shalt honor thy father and thy mother. . . .” These laws, Jim thought, were created because God recognized the weakness of man. He knew that people must be given laws to adhere to. But if “God is Dead,” the clear implication was that so were His laws.

  Jim took a deep drag, let the smoke trail out his nose. It was, he thought, disturbing.