Anarchy in the Ashes (7 page)

“If you don't mind, Ben.” She looked at him, putting her hand on his thigh. “I'd rather it be
us
than them.”

“So would I, Gale.”

“Then let's do it, Ben Raines.”

He met her gaze. “All right, Ms. Roth. Let's do it.”

 

 

“It was only a matter of time,” General Striganov spoke to Sam Hartline. “But Ben Raines need not disturb us all that greatly. Neither he nor us is strong enough to mount any type of sustained attack against the other. Perhaps, really, we might never need to fight. If he will keep to the south, and we to the north, perhaps we could work out some kind of peaceful coexistence plan. I think that would behoove both of us.”

“Don't count on it,” Hartline said. “Raines is a communist hater out of the old school. And he is one tough bastard.”

“I do not want a fight at this time.” The Russian was adamant. “Let us attempt to converse with President-General Raines. During the meeting – if he agrees to it – we shall attempt to work out some dividing line that would separate his form of government from ours – a physical line.” He turned to an aide. “Have leaflets printed and order a team sent out to find General Raines. No contact at this time. Later we shall have a pilot do a fly-by and drop the leaflets. Raines is slowly progressing northward, taking his time, according to our people just in from Rolla.” A look of disgust passed quickly over his face at that thought. The general had already seen to Mikael. “Iowa would be a good place to locate him and for us to meet, I believe.” He studied the map on his office wall. “Yes. Ask Mr. Raines to meet me at, ummm, ah, Waterloo.” He smiled. “Yes, Waterloo, Iowa. That should be a very appropriate place, don't you think, Sam?”

“For one of you,” Hartline grunted his reply. The Russian did not know Ben Raines as well as Sam. Ben Raines would never permit a communist form of government to exist alongside his own. At least Hartline didn't believe he would.

Not for any length of time.

But . . . maybe it was worth a shot.

 

 

On the morning of the third day in Hannibal, the column pulled out, rolling northward on Highway 61. Ben had cautioned his people to be careful, for he remembered only too well the incidents last year, when the Rebels were moving west out of Richmond, when the government collapsed.

 

 

The scouts had failed to report in at their given time. Ben and the convoy waited impatiently on the cold, wind-swept highway. The bridge at Fort Madison had been plugged up tight with stalled and wrecked cars and trucks. The scouts had radioed back they were going on to Hamilton, taking a secondary road. Ben waited a long half hour past the time they were supposed to have radioed in. He turned to Cecil.

“I'm taking a patrol,” Ben told him. “I'll call in every fifteen minutes. Anything happens, you're it.”

“Ben . . .”

“No. It's my show. Maybe the radio conked out. Could be a lot of things. I'll be in touch.”

Back in his pickup, Ben looked at Rosita. “Out,” he told her.

She refused to leave.

“Do I have to toss you out bodily?”

“That would look funny,” she calmly replied.

Ben closed the door and put the truck in gear. “Your ass,” he told her. He pulled out, leading the small patrol.

Rosita smiled at him and said something in rapid-fire Spanish. It sounded suspiciously vulgar.

“Check your watch,” he told Rosita.

“Ten-forty-five.”

“Call in every fifteen minutes. It'll take us forty-five minutes to an hour on these roads to get to Fort Madison. That was their last transmission point. Whatever happened happened between there and Hamilton. You've got the maps. What highway do we take?”

“96 out of Niota.”

At Nauvoo they found the pickup parked in the middle of the highway. One door had been ripped off its hinges and flung to one side of the road.

“What the hell?” Ben muttered.

Rosita's face was pale under her olive complexion. She said nothing. But her eyes were frightened.

Ben parked a safe distance behind the pickup and, Thompson in hand, off safety, on full automatic, walked up to the truck. Thickening blood lay in puddles in the highway.

“Jesus Christ!” one of Ben's Rebels said, looking into a ditch. “General!”

Ben walked to the man's side. The torn and mangled body of the driver lay sprawled in the ditch. One arm had been ripped from its socket. The belly had been torn open, the entrails scattered about, gray in the cold sunlight.

A Rebel pointed toward an open field. “Over here!” he called.

The second scout lay in a broken heap, on his stomach. He was headless. Puddles of blood spread all about him.

“Where's his head?” the man asked.

“I don't know,” Ben answered. “But we'd damn sure better keep ours. Heads up and alert. Combat positions. Weapons on full auto. Back to the trucks in twos. Center of the road and eyes moving. Go.”

Back in the warm cab of the truck, Ben noticed Rosita looking very pale and shaken. He touched her hand. “Take it easy, little one. We'll make it.”

He radioed in to Cecil. “Cec? Backtrack to Roseville and 67 down to Macomb. Turn west on 136. We'll meet you between Carthage and Hamilton. Don't stop for anything. Stay alert for trouble.”

“What kind of trouble, Ben?”

Ben hesitated for a few seconds. “Cec – I just don't know.”

“Ten-four.”

Ben honked his horn and pulled out, the other trucks following.

They saw nothing out of the ordinary as they drove down 96. But Hamilton looked as though it had been sacked by Tartars followed up by hordes of giant Tasmanian devils.

“What the hell?” Ben said, his eyes taking in the ruins of the town. Bits and scraps of clothing blew in the cold winds; torn pages of books and magazines flapped in the breeze, the pages being turned by invisible fingers. Not one glass storefront remained intact. They all looked as if they had been deliberately smashed by mobs of angry, sullen children.

There was no sense to any of it.

Ben said as much.

“Perhaps,” Rosita said, venturing forth an opinion, “those that did it do not possess sense as we know it.”

“What are you trying to say, Rosita?”

“I . . . really don't know, Ben. And please don't press me.”

“All right.”

Ben cut to the bridge and saw it was clear except for a few clumsily erected barricades. They looked as though they had been placed there by people without full use of their mental faculties.

Again, he said as much aloud.

Rosita said nothing.

Ben radioed back to the main column. “Come on through to the bridge at Keokuk, Cec. But be careful.”

“I copy that, Ben. Ben? We just passed through a little town called Good Hope. It looked . . . what was it the kids used to call it? It looked like it had been trashed.”

“I know, Cec. The same with Hamilton. Just no sense to it.”

“We'll be there as quickly as possible, Ben.”

“Ten-four.”

With guards on the bridge, east and west, Ben and the others cleared the structure in a few minutes. Beneath them the Mississippi River rolled and boiled and pounded its way south, the waters dark and angry-looking.

“They look like they hold secrets,” Rosita said, her eyes on the Big Muddy.

“I'm sure they do.” Ben put an arm around her shoulders, pulling her close.

They stood for a time, without speaking, content to be close and to look at the mighty flow of water rushing under them.

“General?” one of the men called. “Take a look at this, sir, if you will.”

Ben and Rosita walked to where the man stood. Painted in white letters on the bridge floor, close to the railing, were these words:

GOD HELP US ALL. WHAT MANNER OF CREATURE HAVE WE CREATED? THEY CAME IN THE NIGHT. I CANNOT LIVE LIKE THIS.

It was unsigned.

“He was talking about the mutant rats,” Ben said.

Rosita looked at him, eyes full of doubt.

“I wonder what happened to the person that wrote this?” the Rebel who discovered the message asked.

“He went over the side,” Rosita said.

“Probably,” Ben agreed.

No more was said of it until the column rolled onto the bridge. There, in the cold January winds, Ben told his people what had happened to the scouts.

Roanna told Ben of the AP messages she had received, and of her sending Jane Moore to Michigan.

Ben was openly skeptical. “Mutant beings, Roanna? Are you serious?”

“Yes, I am. Same copy that told of mutant rats. Received the same night from AP.”

Ben could but stare in disbelief.

“It's entirely possible, Ben,” Cecil said, as the cold winds whipped around them. “I recall hearing some doctor say that after the initial wave of bombings that God alone knew what type of mutations the radiation would bring in animals and humans.”

When Ben spoke, his words were hard and firm. “Now I don't want a lot of panic to come out of this. None of us know what happened to our scouts. They were killed. By what or by whom, I don't know. What I do know is this: We are going to make Tri-States. Home, at least for a while. We've got some rough country to travel, and we've been lucky so far. I expect some firefights before we get there. So all of us stay alert.

“We'll be traveling through some . . . wild country, country that has not been populated for some time – more than a decade. So it's entirely possible that we'll see some . . . things we aren't, haven't witnessed before. I hope not. But let's be prepared for anything. When we do stop at motels, we'll double the guards and stay on our toes. But I won't have panic or any talk of monsters. Let's move out. Let's go home.”

 

 

And now, more than a year later, as the Rebels traveled northward, they began to see more and more evidence of the mutants' existence: destroyed stores that looked as if bands of madmen had descended upon them; absolutely no sign of human life; and that awful odor that was the trademark of the mutants. For a time, it was a drive of utter desolation. And it was making the Rebels nervous.

“Steady down, now,” Ben spoke calmly over the radio. “Keep your weapons at the ready and your eyes open. But stay calm and keep your cool.”

His voice and words and relaxed attitude seemed to do the trick.

“Keep your cool?” Gale looked at him, a smile on her lips. “Boy, that sure dates you, old man.”

“Wanna hear my imitation of Chuck Berry?” Ben asked.

“Forget it,” Ben told her.

“Was he a singer or what?”

Ben ignored her. She grinned at him.

A few miles south of where the highway turned due east, Ben halted the column and put out guards while he consulted a roadmap.

“I was going into Keokuk,” he said to Colonel Gray and Lieutenant Macklin. “But now I don't think I'll take the chance. We'll pick up this secondary road here and take it up to Highway 2, take that all the way until we junction with 63. Then we'll cut right straight up the center of the state. Stay on 63 all the way into Minnesota.”

“You want me to send out advance recon, General?” Colonel Gray asked.

“No,” Ben said. “I think, if what Kat said is true, and I have no reason to doubt her, this General Striganov will probably attempt to contact us.”

“And then?” James Riverson asked, the M-16 looking like a toy against the hugeness of the big ex-truck driver.

“We'll have to play it by ear. But unless provoked, we are not hostile. Let them open the dance.” He looked around for his radioman. He thought of Gale. He smiled as he realized his radioman was a woman. All right. Radioperson. “Corporal, get in touch with Ike back home. Tell him to put two companies on stand-by and have planes standing by ready to go.” He glanced at Colonel Gray. “Do we have two companies of personnel who are jump-qualified?”

“Only by stretching the point, sir, and by pulling them all in from the three-state area.”

“Mary?” he looked around for Lieutenant Macklin.

“Sir?” She stepped forward.

“You know of more riggers down home?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, that's that,” Ben said. “Good idea while it lasted. Colonel, when we get back, I want you to personally train at least two companies of airborne.”

“Sir.”

To the radio operator: “Tell Colonel McGowen we can't risk a jump if his people are needed. The pilots will just have to land the planes on a strip or in the damn road.”

“Right away, sir.”

Fifteen minutes later, Ben ordered the column out. A half hour later, they rolled into Iowa.

 

 

“Radar O'Reilly,” Ben remarked with a smile as they approached Ottumwa, Iowa.

Gale laughed. “I remember watching that show when I was a little girl. But mostly I remember the reruns. It was funny.”

“What did you do directly after the bombings of '88?” Ben asked.

Gale thought for a time. She was so long in silence Ben asked, “First time you've talked about it?”

“Yes,” she replied, the word just audible over the highway rush.

“If it bothers you, don't speak of it.”

“No. I think it's time. It's not all that great, anyway. I mean, as compared to what happened to a lot of other people.”

Ben let her gather her thoughts.