Trapped in the Ashes Read online

  “Yes, sir. You want some coffee?”

  “It would be much appreciated.” Over coffee, Ben said, “Have the vehicles pulled inside and heaters placed nearby. Make sure all extra batteries are fully charged.”

  He counted heads among the crowd, making sure that Jerre was present. She caught him looking at her and as the song goes, for a moment there . . .

  But she cut her eyes away and the moment was lost.

  After Beth was finished with her transmissions, Ben took the radio on scramble. “It would be like Khamsin to try something on a day like this, people, so double your spotters and change frequently to keep your eyes fresh. And while we’ve got the creepies on the run, the fight is far from over. So stay alert and do your best to stay warm. This storm looks like it’s going to be a bad one and a long one.”

  Ben walked back into his office and shoveled some more coal into the small stove, vented through a window and temporarily patched. Since the CP changed frequently, the accommodations were basic at best.

  Buddy walked in and warmed his hands at the stove, then turned to face his father. “I have a bad feeling about this day, Father.”

  “So do I, son. What’s got your hackles up?”

  “It would be a dandy day for a hit-and-run attack.”

  “Against whom?”

  “You. This office. Jerre.”

  “Why not against yourself? Or Tina? Have you given that any thought?”

  “Kidnapping a son or daughter is one thing, Father. Kidnapping the woman a man loves is quite another matter.”

  Ben thought about that for a moment. “It’s that obvious and that well-known?”

  “Yes.”

  “Get some additional people in here, then. And I don’t mean surround the place with a battalion.” Again, Ben was silent in thought. “It would be a suicide run, Buddy. The lower level of this place has been checked out and is secure. A street level attack would be stopped before they reached the sidewalk. If my intelligence is correct, they want her alive, not dead. So it’s going to have to come from the roof, and I will not station people up there in this weather.”

  “I’ll move some people in quietly, Father. We’ll be stationed on the stairwells.”

  “All right, son. Quiet is the word.”

  Buddy nodded and left. Ben sat down in an old rat-chewed chair he pulled close to the stove. He looked up as Beth entered the office.

  “General, this storm is really screwing up radio transmissions. The units are virtually cut off from one another.”

  “I was afraid of that. Heads up, Beth. I have a bad feeling about this day.”

  She walked to the window and looked out. Visibility was down to near zero, and she said as much.

  “They’ll be coming this day. And Khamsin will, too, I’m thinking. Do we have contact with the units in our immediate sector?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Advise them to go on full alert. I imagine that Ike and Cec and West have done the same. And Beth, don’t sell yourself short about being on a list of people the creepies would like to get their hands on. There are a lot of things happening that, of the people in this section, only you and I are privy to.”

  “That has crossed my mind, General.”

  “Stay on top of it, Beth. When you ladies go to the john, go together. Don’t go anywhere in this building alone.”

  “Yes, sir.” She fixed a level gaze at him. “And what about you, sir?”

  “I’m an old wolf, Beth. There have been bounties on my head for the past decade and a half. You can’t poison me and I’m hard to trap. I’m paranoid by nature.” He said the last with a smile.

  “Yes, sir.” She left the room.

  Ben walked to a window on the alley side and peeked through the dark drapes. The building across the narrow alley had been cleared, checked, and rechecked, but Ben knew only too well the creepies could have moved in minutes after his people had made their final check.

  The Night People were fighting with desperation riding on their shoulders, knowing their very survival was at stake. They would stop at nothing now. If they lost fifty percent or ninety percent of their people to win, it would make no difference to them: they could always rebuild their perverted and hideous kingdom, for their way of life was a learned thing.

  Like so many of the problems that had descended upon the United States when it was whole, from drugs to crime, lack of discipline and permissiveness, and everything related to them, it was a learned thing. And it could not be treated by a pat on the head and a promise from the malcontent that he or she would do better.

  Ben had always felt that the way to have a crime-free society was to have no criminals. And for many years in the Tri-States, they had no crime. One reason was they had no elaborate criminal justice system in the Tri-States that catered to the criminal instead of seeing to the needs of the victim.

  Ben turned away from the window and picked up his Thompson, making sure the drum in its belly was leaded up full.

  He slung it, opened his office door, and stepped out into the anteroom. He could feel the tension among his personal crew. They all were feeling that this day was going to be a bad one.

  “Lighten up, gang,” Ben said, his voice calming them. “Whatever comes our way, we’ll handle it. We always have, we always will. History might show us to be no more than aggressive savages, trying to shove our way of life down a lot of unwilling throats. It might show us to be the only force standing between total collapse and anarchy. I don’t know how future historians will treat us. And to be very honest, I don’t know, really, whether I give a damn. Brute force and a driving will to survive and to build a better way of life forged this nation several hundred years ago. Generations later, the powers that be forgot that in their quest to nitpick us into a bunch of whining pansies.” He smiled at the group.

  “Anybody got a deck of cards? I don’t think there’s a one of you can beat me at gin rummy.”

  The day dragged on, each tick of the clock seeming to be as slow as a funeral dirge. They all heard Buddy and his people get into place inside the building. Ben pretended not to notice it.

  Jerre studied his face for a moment, trying to read it. She gave up when Ben said, “Deal.”

  The winds howled and threw millions of bits of frozen ice against the old windows. Ben had guessed the temperature at just a few degrees below freezing, perfect for snow and sleet. And the snow and sleet would alternate with the varying thermometer reading. Come the night, Ben suspected the mercury would drop like a brick and the temperature would be unbearable, especially if these hard winds continued, and they probably would.

  The game continued.

  Just the faintest of foulness drifted to Ben’s nostrils. Or was his mind playing tricks? He couldn’t be sure. No, there it was again. It was no illusion. The Night People were very near.

  Ben studied his cards, arranged them in his hand, and, with a smile, laid them down on the table. “Gin!”

  “Damn, Ben!” Jerre said. “Do you have to win all the time?”

  “Name of the game, kid.” He met her gaze. “You know what a sore loser I am.”

  She narrowed her eyes, trying to read what he meant, but since she had misread his eyes for years, she finally gave up.

  Ben stood up, slinging his Thompson. It drew no attention from the others. They all picked up their weapons whenever they moved around, even within the CP, and especially on this day.

  “I’m going to the head, gang,” Ben said matter-of-factly. “Play a round without me.”

  Jerre was already shuffling the cards as he opened the door and stepped out into the office.

  Ben slipped his Thompson off safety and closed the door behind him. There was that terrible odor again. And it was much stronger than when he had smelled it in the anteroom of his office. He let his eyes sweep the floor for wet footprints. He could see nothing in this hall. But it was a big building, and even though most of it had been sealed off, that meant nothing. The creepies cou
ld have been working on it for days, or nights, opening new entrances.

  Ben stepped back to the closed door and pushed it open. The cardplayers looked up. When Ben spoke, his voice was just audible over the howling of the winds.

  “Jack ’em in, people. Assume defensive positions. The crud are in the building.” He started to close the door.

  “What about you, Ben?” Jerre asked.

  “I’m going head-hunting, kid. Watch your ass.” He closed the door and quietly made his way up the hall. Halfway up the hall, he lifted his handy-talkie. “Rat?”

  “Here, Eagle.”

  “They’re in the building. Very close to me. I can smell them.”

  “Orders?”

  “Come down to my hallway. Quietly now, Buddy. And be very careful.”

  “On my way.”

  Ben squatted in the dark hallway, the only light coming from the windows at the street and alley end. He turned when the fire door at the far end opened, relaxing as Buddy stepped into the hallway. Buddy signaled that he would take one end of the hall, his father the other.

  Ben nodded and held up one thumb. He stood and began moving up the hallway, toward the street side of the building, his boots soft on the floor. He paused at each doorway, kneeling down and sniffing at the base of the door.

  On the third door, he hit pay dirt—a pile of shit would be more like it—as the foulness assailed his nostrils. Reaching up, he clicked the handy-talkie’s talk button twice, and Buddy looked in his direction. Ben pointed to the closed door, and Buddy moved swiftly but quietly to his father’s side.

  Ben took a fire-frag grenade from his battle harness and pulled the pin, holding the spoon down. The fire-frag is a mini-claymore, perhaps the most lethal grenade ever manufactured, filled with ball bearings that spew in all directions when the charge blows.

  The screaming winds picked up in tempo, and Ben thought for a few seconds of the men and women assigned to guarding the still-open bridges connecting the island. They must be miserable. He shook those thoughts away and cut his eyes to Buddy, nodding his head at the closed door and smiling. He released the spoon.

  His son returned the smile and stepped back. He kicked the door open, and Ben tossed in the fire-frag, both of them moving to one side just as the mini-claymore lashed out its lethal load and splattered blood and bone and various parts of anatomy all over the stinking room.

  Ben dropped to one knee and Buddy remained standing as they moved into position and began spraying the room with .45-caliber slugs, their identical Thompsons chugging and spitting out death.

  “Maintain positions!” Ben yelled up the hall. Then, as Buddy flashed a beam of light from his flashlight into the room, Ben methodically shot each creepie sprawled on the bloody floor. Insurance against a crawler faking it.

  The door behind them and to their right suddenly burst open. But at the slight sound of the knob turning, Buddy and Ben had hit the floor and were hammering lead at the opening doorway, knowing that no Rebels were supposed to be in any of these rooms.

  A wild scream of anguish was cut off in the man’s throat as the Thompson rose with the muzzle blast and the slugs struck the night creep from his chest to his face. He was flung backward into the room just as Buddy rolled in a grenade.

  One creepie was flung out into the hall by the heavy blast of the beefed-up grenade, and a section of the wall collapsed, further confusing the dimness with a cloud of dust and plaster. The explosion had prevented them from hearing the gunfire from Ben’s office.

  “Damn, boy!” Ben said. “Where’d you get that hand bomb?”

  “Ordnance just came up with them.” Buddy grinned at his father. “Great, aren’t they?”

  “Wonderful,” Ben said, coughing from the dust and the debris. “I’ll elaborate more when or if my hearing ever returns.”

  They listened as gunfire drummed from the stairwells and the rooftop of the building.

  “They’re holding their own,” Ben said. “Let’s secure this floor and then grab a cup of coffee.” He dropped the drum and inserted a thirty-round clip into the ponderous old antique. It lightened the weight of the old Chicago Piano considerably.

  Door by door, room by darkened room, father and son cleared the floor, finding no more hostiles.

  The floor cleared, the men returned to Ben’s office. Ben rapped on the door. “Secure in there?”

  “Secure, sir!” Jersey’s voice called. “Come on in.”

  Buddy pushed open the hall door, stepping in front of his father and entering first. The door to Ben’s office was hanging on one hinge, the door bullet-pocked. Wind and snow were blowing into the office from shattered windows on the alley side.

  A half a dozen dead night creepies lay sprawled on the floor.

  “They crawled right up the side of the building, Ben,” Jerre told him. “Using ropes and hooks. I guess they thought the noise of the storm would cover any sound they might make.”

  Ben nodded, and it was at that point he made up his mind on several issues that he had been vacillating back and forth on. “Buddy, take a team and clear the floor just above this one. And I mean clear it. Get me some offices about the size of this one and start setting up communications and heating. Son?” Ben looked at him. “Blow the buildings on either side of this one, and in the rear, if possible. Bring them down. As soon as we get our signals back with the other units, I’ll instruct them to do the same around the CPs.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “Let’s start packing up our gear, gang,” Ben told the others. “Cooper, help me with the bodies of this crud.”

  The two men, one at the head and one at the foot, began picking up the bodies of the dead creepies and unceremoniously tossing them out the shattered windows to the alley floor. They would soon lie in grotesquely twisted and frozen heaps.

  Ben summed up his feelings, and the feelings of all the other Rebels. “If their friends want to dine on these creeps, they’ll have to use a chain saw to fillet them!”

  TWELVE

  The storm raged on the remainder of that day and well into the night. About three hours after dark had slowly shoved light around the corners of the world, the snow and sleet stopped and the mercury tumbled. But the wind kept up its battering and howling.

  With the cessation of snow and sleet, radio communications improved and Ben was able to speak with all units scattered around the Big Apple.

  “Did you get hit today, Ike?” Ben asked.

  “Ten-fifty, Ben. We ain’t seen nothin’ down here. Been tryin’ to contact you all day.”

  Ben got all commanders on the horn and quickly explained what had happened and what he had done about the buildings bordering his CP.

  “We’ll start doing that this night, Ben,” Cecil told him. “Are we going to raze the city?”

  “I don’t know, Cec. It really bothers me to think about doing it. I just haven’t fully made up my mind about that.”

  “It may come to it, General,” West reminded him.

  “Yeah. I know. How about the survivors around the Central Park area, West?”

  “Gene Savie and his group?”

  “Yes.”

  “Most of them are New York born and reared. It makes them nervous to think about the city being destroyed. The Underground People don’t like them or trust them. I think Savie and his people are a bunch of candy-asses. For the most part, this sector has remained fairly quiet.”

  “If the weather abates in the morning, we’ll all resume our treasure-hunting,” Ben ordered. “At first light, we’ll rotate the teams guarding the bridges. They’ve got to be exhausted. Maintain a sharp lookout for infiltration from the Hot Wind and his Farts. The Night People are fighting for their very existence now, and they’ve started desperation moves. So heads up, people. Eagle out.”

  Ben leaned back in the chair in his new office and tried to put himself in the role of the Night People. What would he do?

  The creepies knew that the Rebels were scattered all over the ci
ty, from 220th Street in the north all the way down to Battery Park. Some of the outposts and observation teams were no more than five or six people strong.

  Would the creeps try to overrun the smaller units by sheer numbers?

  Only as a last act of desperation, Ben concluded—a kamikaze move when all else had failed, the Night People dying screaming out their rage and hate for the Rebels.

  Trying to overrun the smaller units would prove too costly for the Night People, even at this stage of the war. For the creepies certainly had observed how carefully the smaller units had bunkered themselves in, and how deadly their field of fire was.

  The Night People had small arms, a few heavy machine guns and rocket launchers, and a few mortars. Not even Khamsin could match Ben’s Rebels in terms of firepower, and no known force on the face of the earth could even come near the Rebels when it came to morale.

  Ben smiled when he recalled the words of that old Texas Ranger who had said, “It’s hard to stop a man when he knows he’s right and just keeps on coming.”

  Ben concluded that the Night People would keep on with their harassing actions against the Rebels—not risking too many lives in doing so.

  Of course the deal they had struck earlier about the use of booby traps was down the tube. From now on the war would be as dirty and nasty and unconventional as the human mind could conceive.

  Long-range and very secret patrols had reported back that Brooklyn was, for the most part, clear of Night People. They had committed everything to Manhattan. Cecil and Rebel would have to keep the bridges in their area open. Ben had plans for the old shipyard—very important plans. Plans that only he and a very few others knew anything about. Whatever else happened, those east bridges had to be kept intact.

  Ben rose from his chair and looked in on his crew. They were getting ready for bed. Ben walked to his cot, sat down, and pulled off his boots, stretching out on the cot. It had been a busy day, and he suspected the following days were going to be just as busy, or more so. He closed his eyes and let sleep take him, very much aware that Jerre was in the next room.