Danger in the Ashes Read online

  Hiram would not meet Ben’s eyes. “God’s will,” he finally muttered.

  “God’s will?” Ben shouted. “It isn’t God’s will! It’s your own goddamned stupidity, man! Did you see all those cattle trucks arriving when you came in? We’ve been breeding a stronger, hardier breed for years . . . free of contamination. Did you ever think about things like that, Hiram?”

  Hiram refused to answer.

  “After the bombs came, Hiram . . . and the survivors began trickling in, did any of your people take them as wives or husbands?”

  Hiram looked at Billy Bob.

  “I see,” Ben calmed down, leaning back in his chair. “Your kids, Billy . . . how are they?”

  “Different,” the man said.

  “How different?”

  “They ain’t right. Some of them was borned blind; some of them born . . . all twisted and ugly. Only two of them lived.”

  “I’m sorry, Billy. Your wife?”

  “First one died. I kept it in the family since then.”

  “No doubt,” Ben muttered.

  Keep that up, Ben thought, and you’ll eventually get the same results.

  “Start bringing your people in tomorrow morning, Hiram. First light. I want them all to have complete medical check-ups.”

  “I don’t reckon I got no choice in the matter, does I, General Raines?”

  “No, Hiram. I reckon you don’t.”

  FOUR

  “Makes me feel like some damned commandant of a concentration camp,” Ben said to Dan, after Hiram and Billy Bob had left.

  Dan nodded. “Sometimes, general, one has to do things that are distasteful, but for the good of the majority.”

  “Thank you, Dan. Take a battalion down tonight. You have parish maps?”

  “Yes, sir. Found them at what used to be the Chamber of Commerce office.”

  Dr. Chase walked in, Cecil right behind him.

  “You’re late,” Ben bitched.

  “My, haven’t we become the punctual one?” Chase sat down. “Blow it out your beret, general.”

  One thing Ben could always count on was Lamar Chase bringing him down to earth, and if he didn’t do it, Ike would.

  Ben outlined his plans.

  Chase nodded his head in agreement. “I have teams cleaning up the hospital now. It really isn’t in that bad a shape. Some progress was actually tried here in this community, Ben.”

  “Took a damn war to do it!”

  “He’s quite argumentative today,” Dan said. “Comes with having something loosely called a conversation with cretins, I should imagine.”

  “Thank you, Dan,” Ben said. “I couldn’t have said it better.”

  Ike had been standing at the door. “Don’t compliment that Limey too much, Ben. He gets the big head.”

  “Idiot!” the ex-SAS officer said to the ex-SEAL.

  “Stuffed shirt!” Ike fired back.

  “Hillbilly!”

  “All right!” Ben ended it. “You getting your equipment lined out, Ike?”

  “Right. It’s goin’ on so smoothly we’ll be able to pull out in the morning. I’m taking Dr. Ling, La-mar.”

  “Good man. If there is something he doesn’t know about radioactivity, it hasn’t been written yet.”

  “Who have you chosen as XO, Ike?”

  “Major Broadhurst. Tina’s going to range out about two hundred miles ahead of us. Here’s the route, Ben.” He laid a map on the desk. “From here to Memphis, then we cut east to Nashville, Knoxville. We know D.C. took a hot one. That’s fact. So we’ll stay on Eighty-one all the way into Maryland. After that, we’ll have to play it by ear.”

  “Sounds good, Ike.”

  “OK. I got things to do. I’ll leave you boys to your roundin’ up of rednecks. See you in the mornin’, Ben.” He grinned and left the office.

  “You want me to take ten or twelve deuce and a halfs down into his wretched community, general?” Dan asked. “To further hasten any recalcitrant recluses?”

  “Yes. Good idea. Dan, I’ll be blunt. These people have been borderline lawless for decades. Don’t fuck around with them. First one to bow up, butt-stroke him and put him on the ground. Force is the one thing they understand.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Has Colonel West and his meres pulled in yet, Cec?”

  “Yes, Ben. They’re bivouacked about ten miles east of town. Strange man, that Colonel West.”

  “Yes. Lamar, how are we fixed for medicines?”

  “Pretty good. It’s doubtful these people have been inoculated against anything. So that is the first order of business. This area has reverted back swiftly since the bombings. Malaria and typhoid fever worry me. But my big concern is typhus.”

  “Why typhus, Lamar?”

  “Transmitted by fleas and lice.”

  “I agree.” He called for an aide. He stuck his head into the room. “Have the school grounds and buildings sprayed top to bottom. And have a delousing tent set up.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Dan? After the people have been moved out tomorrow, have teams sent out to inspect each home. If they’re living in squalor . . . burn it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That’s not going to win you any friends, Ben,” Cecil reminded him.

  “I am well aware of that, Cec. It’s just a matter of time before Hiram and his bunch elect to do one of two things. They’ll either pull out in the middle of the night, or they’ll fight.”

  “You’re that sure, Ben?” Lamar asked.

  “Yes. Hiram despises me. Always has. The first time some kid tells him that we’re teaching against his philosophy, that’s when it’s going to hit the fan.”

  “The children are the hope for the future, general,” Dan spoke up. “We cannot allow a child to be brought up in ignorance.”

  “I don’t intend to allow it, Dan. That is why most of the time, just a whole lot of those kids from the Stanford Community will be spending the night with various Rebel families here in town.”

  “That isn’t going to make you any more popular with the ’necks, Ben,” Cecil told him. “But I have to applaud your plan.”

  “I never cared about being popular with trash, Cec. They have no place in my plans.”

  “You know, Raines,” Dr. Chase said, “it’s just a damn wonder somebody didn’t shoot you back when you were ranting and raving with the written word.”

  “They tried, Lamar. They tried. It was then that I knew I’d touched a raw nerve.” He turned to look out the still-dirty window of the old bank building. “It was only then that I fully grasped the seriousness of the problem. Ninety-five percent of the people like Hiram will never change. But there is hope for the kids. And whether it’s right or moral for me to do what I’m doing . . . God will have to judge me on that point. For now, I can do only what I think is best for future generations.”

  * * *

  “What are we gonna do, Hiram?” The question was thrown at him from amid the white-robed and coned-hatted crowd who had gathered in the darkness. The cross had burned down to only a faint glow.

  “We got to go along with Raines till we can come up with a plan.” Hiram’s oldest, Billy, had refused to attend the meeting this night, and that both confused and hurt Hiram. Since the meeting earlier in the day with Raines, Billy had been moody and untouchable. The boy acted like he had something heavy on his mind.

  “They’s too many of ’em for us to fight, Hiram. And that’s what I think Ben Raines wants . . . a fight.”

  “In a way he do,” Hiram agreed. “If it was jist us, he would. But Ben’s got plans for the younguns. I don’t know what they is, but that sneaky bastard’s got somethang up his sleeve. Y’all can jist bet on that.”

  “Furst time one of them nigger Rebels gives me an order, I’m a-gonna bus’ his head,” a pus-gutted man loudly proclaimed.

  Hiram remembered the muzzle of that gun stuck up under his chin. Humiliating! “No, you won’t, neither, Carl. You’ll jist do ’xac
tly whut he tells you to do. We’re so bad outnumbered by them Rebels we ain’t even in the ballpark, much less in the game. I don’t know yet what we’re gonna do. And until I can come up with somethang, we just play ’er easy-like.”

  Billy sat on his front porch and thought of the man called Ben Raines. There was something about the man that both drew and frightened Billy Bob. And it was embarrassing about that book. Billy had never told his father, but he didn’t like not being able to read right. Billy always thought that all them books he’d seen all piled up in stores and libraries and homes had to have been writ for some reason. And he figured that there was good to be had in a lot of them.

  Problem was, he couldn’t make out the words.

  And them Rebel soldiers; they just seemed so, well, busy, he reckoned. Like they knowed they had a good purpose in life and was right eager to get crackin’ on it. And ever’where he’d looked that day, he’d seen men and women and kids with books in they hands. There had to be something to it, or else all them folks wouldn’t be foolin’ with it.

  And what was that word General Raines had used? Yeah . . . civility. Nice-sounded word, Billy thought. Felt good on the tongue. Problem was, he didn’t know what it meant. Get right down to the truth of it, Billy didn’t know half of what General Raines had said.

  And it just, by golly, shouldn’t oughta be that way. A man ought to be able to have sense enough to know what the other feller is talking about.

  Billy watched as his brother, Grover Neal, rode his horse up to the porch of the house. “Billy,” the young man said. “Daddy was some put-out ’bout you not goin’ to the gatherin’ this night.”

  “Had things to do, Grover.”

  “Whut?”

  “Mind things.”

  “Whut kind of thangs?”

  “Thinkin’ to do.”

  “Oh.”

  Billy’s older boy, by wife number two, came out onto the porch and sat down in front of the old TV set that rested on the porch. “Magic box,” the boy said.

  For some unexplainable reason, that statement got all over Billy. “It isn’t a magic box, Richard Lee. It’s just an old television set.”

  “Mister G.B. says it’s a magic box,” the boy said.

  Billy almost said that Mister G.B. was a fool and had been for as long as Billy had known him. But then he remembered that G.B. was his pa’s best friend.

  “Yeah, it’s a magic box, Richard Lee,” Grover spoke up.

  “Shut up!” Billy’s tone was harsh toward his brother. “Don’t be fillin’ the boy’s head with crap. No such thing as magic.”

  “Ummmm!” Grover backed up. “I bet you won’t say that to Old Lady Pauly. She put a hex on you, boy.”

  “Go on back home, Grover. You’re talkin’ like a fool!”

  “I’m a-gonna tale Daddy on you, boy!” Grover swung back into the saddle.

  “You do that. Right now, you bes’ just get on out of here.”

  “If this here ain’t a magic box,” the boy asked, after his uncle had ridden off into the night, “what then be it?”

  Billy sighed. “Son, back when I was just about your age, we had something called TV. Folks could send pitchers . . . pictures, through the air and they’d form up on that screen and we could watch shows that come all the way from, well, Mon-roe.”

  The child drew back from the set, suddenly fearful of the set. “No!”

  “Oh, yeah, Richard. But it wasn’t nothing to be afraid of.”

  “Can you make it do it agin?”

  “No, boy. I’m . . .” Then he admitted the truth. “I’m not smart enough.”

  “I bet Grandpaw could do it!”

  “No, boy. He can’t do it, neither.”

  “But Grandpaw knows ever’thang.”

  He just thinks he do, Billy thought. If I was a big enough man to tell you the truth, Grandpaw is nearabouts as dumb as I am.

  “But I seen a man today that probably could make that thing light up. Or if he couldn’t, I betcha he’s got some people with him that can.”

  “Who he be?”

  “Man name of Ben Raines.”

  The boy looked at his father. “But Grandpaw says Ben Raines is evil.”

  Billy then took the first step toward breaking out of the bonds of ignorance and near-barbarism. “Your Grandpaw is wrong, boy. General Ben Raines ain’t evil.”

  “Then what he be, Pa?”

  “Smart. I think he’s got the in-sight, boy.”

  The boy gasped. “I be fearful of that man, Pa.”

  Billy shook his head. “No need to be. What you need to do is learn from him and his kind.”

  Behind the screen door, wife number two was standing in silence, hands to her mouth, listening in shock. Her husband was talking agin the leader.

  And it was the code that she had to report him.

  An hour before dawn, and Ben and Ike were sitting alone in a mess tent, having breakfast and talking.

  “If New York City is still intact, Ike, it’s a good bet that’s the headquarters of the Night People. What was it we were told in Atlanta. The Judges. Yes. The Judges are the council; they make the rules for the Night People.”

  “And the place is gonna be swarmin’ with those heathens.”

  “Yes. I think that’s why they eventually had to branch out. New York couldn’t support them all. So they began fanning out. If what we’re saying is true, the Night People could be the biggest threat we’ve ever faced.”

  Ike shuddered. “Can you just imagine a million of those creatures, Ben?”

  “Mind-boggling, isn’t it?”

  “To say the least.”

  “I’m thinking that if New York City is intact, and inhabited, the city is probably cordoned off by various groups. Street punks and warlords probably control parts of it; Night People control other parts; decent citizens might have a stronghold there. We just don’t know.”

  “I’ll find out, Ben.”

  “Ike, I am giving you a direct order. Keep your big ass out of the city. Do you understand me, Ike?”

  “That’s a big ten-four, Ben.” The ex-SEAL grinned at Ben.

  Ben stuck out his hand and Ike took it. “Luck to you, Ike. And look after my little girl.”

  “Will do, Ben. I spoke to Cecil and Chase and Dan last night.”

  “I’ll keep an eye on Nina for you.”

  Ike smiled. “Tell you what, Ben. As testy as she’s been the last few days, I’m glad to get gone!”

  Laughing, the two men moved out into the quiet of early morning.

  Ben stood in the darkness and watched as Ike linked up with his two-hundred-person unit. They had a long and dirty and dangerous route ahead of them. Ben knew Cecil was mildly pissed at him for not having been chosen to go; but Ben needed Cec here. Cecil had a calming influence about him. The man almost never lost his temper — however when he did, one had better stand aside, for the former Green Bennie was awesome in a fight, and for his age, still amazingly powerful. When it come to administration and logistical problems, Cecil was the best.

  When the last vehicle in Ike’s column was gone, Ben walked back into the mess tent and drew himself another mug of what currently passed for coffee. He sat alone with his thoughts.

  Hiram had taken everything too calmly to suit Ben; he figured the man’s brain was working overtime, trying to come up with a plan to outfox the man he hated more than anything on the face of the earth. Ben’s thoughts went winging back, sailing through the years. . . .

  . . . “’at’s him over yonder.” Ben heard the voice come from behind him. He did not look around.

  “The skinny feller with the beer?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He don’t look lak much to me.”

  Favorite redneck game; bait the stranger and see if he’ll fight.

  All real men fistfight. Ever’body knows that. If he won’t fight, he’s probably a queer.

  Late afternoon, years before the Great War would alter the lives of every human being
on the face of the earth for untold generations to come. Ben had stopped, against his better judgment, at a ’neck honky-tonk a few miles from Morriston.

  “Bring us a beer, Carol,” Hiram had called. “A long neck. Ast that lanky drank of water at the bar ifn he’d lak a sodee pop. He looks too sissy to be drankin’ a man’s drank.”

  Ben smiled at the waitress. “I’ll pass.”

  Ben knew exactly what was coming next, and Hiram didn’t disappoint him.

  “You too good to drank with us, boy?”

  “That’s Hiram Rockingham, mister,” the barmaid said in a hoarse whisper. “He’s bad.”

  “He certainly smells that way,” Ben said, raising his voice.

  “Whut’s ’at?” Hiram hollered. “Whut’d he say ’bout me?”

  “I said you stink like shit, you ignorant motherfucker,” Ben said. He still had not turned around. He was watching the ’neck in the mirror.

  Hiram stood up and balled his hands into fists. “Ah thank ah’ll jist whup your ass for that.”

  “I doubt it.”

  When Hiram was two steps away from him, Ben turned and hit the redneck in the face with the beer mug. Blood and beer went flying. Ben grabbed Hiram by the seat of his dirty jeans, the other hand on his equally dirty neck, and drove him headfirst into a wall.

  Turning, Ben picked up a pool cue and hit the first ’neck he could find in the teeth. Tobacco-stained pearlies went flying. The other ’neck went racing for the door. Ben jammed the business end of the cue stick between the man’s cowboy boots and brought him down . . . then kicked him in the head.

  The others in the joint had not moved. But Ben heard one say, “Best pass the word to leave that son of a bitch alone.”

  Ben ordered another beer and sipped on it until Hiram began to groan and move. Ben then poured the rest of the beer on his head.

  Ben stepped back and waited; stepped back far enough so that Hiram could not kick or grab him.

  “We was only funnin’ wift you,” Hiram said, getting to his feet.

  “It is a joke only when all parties find it amusing. But I don’t suppose someone as ignorant as you could ever possibly comprehend that.”