Survival in the Ashes Read online

  “Gas!” he screamed. “The bastard’s using poisonous gas.”

  Many miles to the south, the planes carrying Ben and his contingent were just making their northern turn.

  The young Kenny Parr was the first to react sensibly. He quickly consulted an old map and said, “Everybody backtrack to one fifty-nine and cut north,” he said, his voice firm. “We can’t stop for anything. Raines will surely have another larger force coming in as soon as the gas clears. Let’s go!”

  The three terrorists and what was left of their armies ran for vehicles, running in a near-blind panic as the screaming began to fade from the death town. “Take the lead, Kenny,” Villar shouted. “We’ll follow.”

  Atop a roof, Dan watched the frightened exodus through binoculars, a grim smile of satisfaction on his face as death clogged the streets below him. He turned to his radio operator. “Let them go. They’ll be out of range for us in less than a minute anyway.”

  As the frightened remnants of the terrorist army escaped, many of those still on foot were run over and crushed under the tires of the vehicles used in the rush of retreat. In many cases their dying took much longer than their comrades trapped in the town. A few managed to pull their crushed bodies off the roadway and into the ditches, where they died amid the litter and twinkle of years’-old soft drink and beer cans. The cans would still be twinkling years after their bones had turned to dust.

  As the planes flew over Belleville, they turned toward the east, the pilots reporting the hurried retreat of the terrorists to Ben.

  “Let them go,” Ben radioed to the cockpit. “It’s twenty miles from the river to their present location. No way Ike could possibly catch them. Transportation on this side of the river is uncertain, at best. We’ll catch up with them another day.” He changed frequencies and said, “Eagle One to Scout Leader.”

  “Go Eagle One,” Dan’s calm voice sprang into Ben’s headset.

  “Situation report.”

  “Wall-to-wall bodies, Eagle. There is no sign of life on the streets. The team at the airstrip where you will land says to stay clear for another five minutes.”

  “That’s ten-fifty, Dan. We’ve already injected our selves. We’re safe. We’ll be landing in three minutes. Send trucks on the way.”

  “That’s ten-four, Eagle.” He changed frequencies and ordered, “Drivers commandeer enemy trucks and meet the Eagle at the strip. Go!”

  Rebels literally climbed over the bodies of dead terrorists and outlaws to get to the enemy vehicles. They cranked up — many of the engines were still running — and headed for the old Air Force base south of town.

  A quiet fell over the town as the Rebels left their positions to stand and look in awe at the sight before their eyes. More than six thousand men lay in the streets and on the sidewalks; some hung out of the windows of cars and trucks and Jeeps. Their faces were forever frozen in that last agonizing moment of death as the deadly gas took their lives.

  Dan walked down the steps from the rooftop to the street below. He stood for a moment, looking at the stiffening carnage. “You may begin stripping the bodies of weapons and ammo,” he ordered. “Take all radio equipment and anything else you see that we might be able to use. Start moving the usable vehicles clear of town. After General Raines makes his visual, we’ll burn the town to eliminate any health hazard.”

  Ben pulled in moments later. The Rebels had all seen death many times, but none of them — including Ben — had ever seen death like this; not on this wholesale level.

  The faces of the dead men were turning black; the death grimaces an awful sight to witness. Hands had turned into claws as the respiratory systems shut down and fingers tore into the flesh of throat in a futile attempt to suck in air. Nervous systems had refused to function, leaving limbs twisted in near-impossible positions. Some lay on their backs, arms, and hands stiffly outstretched heavenward, as if seeking some godly relief to help them cope with this awful moment of death.

  If God heard the silent pleas, He did nothing that Ben could see to aid the terrorists and outlaws.

  “Some of the enemy trucks have scraper blades on them. ’Doze the bodies onto the main street,” Ben ordered. “Douse them with gasoline and burn them. When that’s done, have artillery lay back and destroy the town with napalm and Willie Peter.”

  “Right, sir.”

  “How long do you anticipate recovering the captured supplies?”

  “We should be finished by noon, sir.”

  Ben nodded. “You’ve dispatched trucks to pick up Ike and his people?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Again, Ben nodded. “West has some of his people rigging barges to use as ferries across the river. Start the convoys moving westward as quickly as possible.”

  “Right, sir.”

  “Corrie, radio Cecil and have him start his demolition teams planting explosives around the city and other teams clearing a way for us through the city. I want the first units moving toward our battle lines in Central Missouri by dawn tomorrow.” He turned to his daughter. “Tina, move out ahead of them and set up my CP in Jefferson City . . . or what’s left of it.”

  “Right, Dad.”

  “Double your usual team size and move with Dusters, mortar carriers, and main battle tanks. Voleta will have people between the river and our lines. Destroy them. No prisoners. Move out now, Tina.”

  Ben had not expected Thermopolis and his people to accompany Ike’s people, but they did. Thermopolis stood at the end of the street and stared at the sight.

  “My God!” he whispered. “There is death wherever one looks.”

  Rosebud took it much more stoically and pragmatically. “They had a choice,” she said. Then she leaned down, plucked a wildflower that was growing out of a crack in the street, and stuck it behind one ear. “They just didn’t make the right choice.”

  Her husband fixed her with a jaundiced look. Every fiber in his being wanted to debate that remark, but he wisely decided against it. He couldn’t remember ever winning an argument with her anyway.

  Twisting curls of black smoke arched into the sky moments after the bodies of the dead were set blazing. The dead had been bulldozed onto the main street, doused with gasoline, and torched. As soon as the flames began to wane, Ben ordered the artillery barrage to begin and the afternoon was filled with long-range booming, the napalm and WP shells setting the town blazing.

  Rebels had taken up positions around the town, digging firebreaks to prevent the flames from spreading, and in some case lighting backfires to arrest the forward motion of the leaping flames.

  Ben motioned Dan to his side. “You want the job of pursuing the terrorists, Dan?”

  The Englishman smiled coldly. “I would be offended if you gave it to anyone else. Naturally, since you are moving against Voleta, you would like me to take Buddy and his Rat Team with me.” It was not a question.

  “Yes. Pick your people and equipment.”

  “I shall be in pursuit by dawn tomorrow.”

  Ben watched the former SAS officer walk away, yelling for Buddy and his Rat Team to form up around him. If there was a man alive who could track down and kill Villar and what was left of his army of terrorists, Dan Gray was that man. And with the addition of Hans Strobel, the German might be able to give some insight as to what Villar could possibly do next.

  One thing was for certain at this time: Lan Villar was no longer much of a threat to the Rebel movement.

  With rear guard personnel radioing that there was no pursuit from the Rebels, Lan called a halt to the frantic retreat.

  They were just north of Litchfield when the battalions regrouped on the shores of a lake and began counting heads.

  It was discouraging to all.

  Out of an initial force of nearly twelve thousand men, twelve hundred had been killed or wounded in the first bombardment by Raines’s Rebels. Another thousand had been killed or wounded by the surprise assault early that morning, and more than six thousand had been killed by the gas.
Another thousand or so had scattered like paper in the wind when the first gas cannisters popped. Whether they had survived or not was anybody’s guess.

  Personally, Lan figured at the most, maybe half of them made it. He knew he would probably never see one tenth of those survivors again.

  “Twenty-three hundred men able to fight, sir,” Lan’s XO reported to him later that afternoon. “And most of them belong to us.”

  “Khamsin?”

  “Four hundred troops.”

  “Kenny?”

  “Two hundred and fifty troops.”

  Villar snorted bitterly. “And we are left with less than three full battalions.”

  “Your orders, sir?”

  Villar sighed. Earlier he had watched the clouds of black smoke darkening the sky south of their position, and knew what it was: bodies burning with the town. “Karl, I just don’t know.”

  Ben went back across the river on the ferry’s first return trip. It had been a most fruitful morning. The Rebels had captured more than five hundred vehicles; more than two hundred of them Volvo and Mercedes trucks. Ben ordered them carefully gone over and stored. These would be the vehicles they would take to Europe; it would be easier to find parts for them over there than for American-made trucks.

  With Khamsin’s army crushed, that meant they would more than likely leave from some port in South Carolina. As soon as Ben could spare the people, he would have the trucks driven out to South Carolina, fully loaded with supplies for the voyage.

  He cleared his head of those thoughts. That was in the future. For now, he had an army to destroy.

  And his son’s mother to kill.

  EIGHT

  Ben stepped outside into a still dark but already busy morning around his CP just south of the city.

  He could tell by the way his people moved that they were in high spirits. They had come out of what at first appeared to be a brutal fight without losing one single troop — Chase had already closed the hospital, packing everything for the move west — and the Rebels had handed the enemy a devastating defeat.

  They had reason to be in high spirits.

  And the scuttlebutt was that General Raines was taking three battalions and heading for Europe, just as soon as Sister Voleta and her nuts of the Ninth Order were defeated. All in all, they concluded, it shaped up to be a very interesting summer.

  Ben sat down on the curb, a cup of coffee in his hand, and watched the loading of equipment preparatory to their pulling out of the city.

  Jerre came out and joined him on the curb. She studied his face for a moment and then said, “You don’t seem as happy as the troops, Ben.”

  “Voleta is not going to be as easy to defeat as Villar, Jerre. For one thing, she isn’t as arrogant as he appears to be. Another reason is that she’s been fighting me for a long time. She knows better than to mass her people as Villar did. We’ll be fighting nasty little pitched battles. Ambushes. And we’ll be fighting along a one-hundred-and-fifty mile front. Probably two fronts, for that bitch will have people behind us as well. It isn’t going to be a piece of cake, Jerre. Anything but. It’s going to be long and bloody and nerve-racking.”

  “By long, you mean? . . .”

  “End of summer before we’re through. Then a four-thousand-mile boat ride to Ireland.”

  “Why Ireland?”

  Ben smiled. “Because we’re going to hit it before we do England.”

  “Smartass!” She grinned at him. Her smile faded. “What do you expect to find, Ben?”

  “Trouble.”

  Dan had crossed over into Illinois by ferry, taking with him four hundred and fifty handpicked infantry personnel. He took a section of Dusters, half a dozen main battle tanks, three mortar carriers, and heavy trucks carrying spare parts for all equipment, food, treads for the tanks, tires, and ammo for all weapons.

  “You get your butt in a bind, Dan,” Ben told him, “you get on that horn and radio in. I can have birds in the air within the hour.”

  “Will do, General. Ta-ta, now.” He saluted smartly and wheeled about, yelling at the top of his lungs for his people to mount up.

  “Let’s split, people!” Ben yelled.

  “Split?” Rosebud said, looking at Thermopolis. “General Raines actually said let’s split?”

  “I think he’s really a hippie in disguise.”

  “Damn good disguise if he is. He sure fooled me. Are we in this for the duration?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Have you asked the others?”

  “Yes.”

  “And they said? . . .”

  “They always wanted to see Europe.”

  That topic was put to rest by the arrival of Emil Hite and his band of followers. Emil rolled up in his hearse — there was a bed in the back so he could take a nap when he felt like it — and got out, his people grouping around him. Emil faced Thermopolis.

  “Are we ready to go do battle with the wicked witch of the west, Therm?”

  “We’re gung ho and ready to go, Emil,” Thermopolis told him.

  “That’s the spirit, Therm. We’ve been assigned to the center of the column. We’re off, Therm.”

  “Right, Emil.” In more ways than one, he silently added, then felt a small pang of guilt for thinking it. Emil wasn’t that bad a person. He was just a con artist and always would have one scam or the other going for him; always harmless scams that never really hurt anybody. But the little man would stand and fight when he had to . . . one could not take that away from him.

  Emil waved his group to their vehicles and they drove off, to take their positions in the miles-long column.

  Leadfoot, Beerbelly, Wanda, and their bikers pulled in behind Emil, with Emil twisting in the seat to keep a close eye on them. He wasn’t too sure about the bikers.

  Thermopolis and his crew got in their VW Bugs and vans and pulled in behind the bikers. Thermopolis rather liked the bikers, seeing through their façade and knowing that despite their toughness — and they were a tough bunch — most of them were just full of horseshit and quite likable when you got to know them. And the bikers liked Thermopolis and the hippies. They knew a kindred spirit when they found one; although the kindred spirits of the over-the-hill hippies were of a gentler nature than the bikers.

  Downtown St. Louis began to explode and burn as the Rebels moved out. Rebel sharpshooters with .50-caliber sniper rifles were stationed all along strategic points surrounding the city. They took a fearful toll on the Night People as the creepies ran to escape the explosions and flames.

  Ben and his personal team were the last to leave the burning city. He halted his short column on an overpass on Interstate 40 and got out, to face the east and the smoke and flames. The killing gunfire of the Rebel snipers could be clearly heard over the roaring of the wind-fed and unchecked flames.

  “The wind is out of the west,” Ben said. “So the river will stop the flames from spreading any further.”

  “You seem especially sad to see this city go, General,” Jersey observed.

  “I used to spend a lot of time in St. Louis as a teenager, Jersey. But they all have to go, I’m afraid. Like it or not. Every city in America has to be brought down. The creepies have to be flushed out of their holes and killed. We’ve learned that they cannot be rehabilitated — no matter how hard we try — so that doesn’t leave us much choice. Corrie, is Tina in place in Jeff City?”

  “Yes, sir. She encountered no resistance along the way. She has your command post set up and waiting.”

  “Cooper, we’ll take the old river road, Highway Ninety-four. Corrie, order Scouts out along that route and advise them to be on the lookout for survivors. People have a habit of settling along waterways. I want more outposts set up as we move along.”

  “Right, sir.”

  “Let’s go.”

  Cooper cut off the Interstate just after crossing the Missouri River and linked up with Highway 94. As Ben had expected, they saw no signs of human life until they were a good
thirty miles west of the burning city. The creepies had been working this area hard, in their search for human flesh.

  “Bastards,” Jerre muttered from the third seat in the wagon.

  “We’ll defeat them,” Ben said. “We’ve got them running scared and scared people make mistakes. In the past year we’ve killed thousands of them, and we’ll kill thousands more before the land is reasonably safe once more. Every city has to go. Once Voleta is dealt with, we’ll probably take a month for another search and destroy before we go sailing on the bounding main.”

  Cooper looked at him. “Before we do what, sir?”

  “Your education is sadly lacking, Coop,” Ben told him. “I think I’ll ask one of Therm’s bunch to be your tutor for a time. You need to be better versed in literature.”

  Cooper grinned. “That redhead will do me just fine, General.”

  “Santo was, I believe, a teacher before the war. I’ll ask him.”

  Cooper groaned and the others laughed.

  “Scouts are stopped just up ahead, General,” Corrie said. “Little town called Marthasville. The people aren’t hostile, just curious.”

  “Tell them we’ll be along presently. How do the people look?”

  “Tough and capable, Ham said.”

  “Very good.” Ben looked at his map. “That would be an excellent spot for an outpost. We’ll see if the people are amenable to that.”

  “Do what?” Cooper asked.

  Ben sighed. “Cooper, you are definitely going back to school.”

  “Will it help my driving?” he asked.

  It was too good to pass up. “Nothing would help your driving, Cooper,” Jersey said. “It’s a miracle we’re all still alive.”

  After the laughter, Ben said, “Just remember this, Coop: in Ireland and England, you are to drive on the left side.”