Courage In The Ashes

by William W. Johnstone

  The man sighed and nodded his head. “Yes. If that is the only way the majority of us can survive. But I have to say this: I believe, General Raines, that you are the hardest man I have ever encountered.”

  Therm smiled, knowing what Ben was going to say, and he wasn’t disappointed.

  “Hard times, brother,” Ben said. “Hard times.”

  Peachland was still burning when the Rebels pulled up and stopped at the outskirts of the small town.

  “Gunships report the retreating outlaws have blown the bridges at Kelowna and just north of Vernon,” Corrie told him.

  “Damn!” Ben said, lifting and studying a map. “We’ll have to take this secondary road on the west side of the lake. It’s going to slow us down to a crawl. Tell those gunships to engage the enemy and do some damage, Corrie.”

  “They have prisoners, Ben,” Lamar Chase said quietly.

  “I am fully aware of that, Lamar.” Ben walked away, to stand alone, as leaders of great armies have done since the beginnings of large-scale warfare.

  Ben and Therm’s battalions moved at almost a snail’s pace on the badly rutted, and, in spots, nearly impassable secondary road. Many times the long column was forced to stop while engineers repaired the road. With nightfall approaching, they shut it down at Wilson Landing. The other battalions were also reporting bridges being blown and many barricades on the highways.

  One bright spot: the gunships reported that they had scored a lot of hits on the retreating outlaws.

  A forward recon team pulled back in after being relieved of the lonely and dangerous duty. They reported to Ben.

  “Those gunships did a number on the outlaws’ asses, General,” a team leader reported, unable to hide the grin on his face. “They lost a lot of men. Tomorrow you can see for yourself the damage they did.”

  “And we lost no gunships in the process,” Ben said, having already received and reviewed a preliminary report.

  “No, sir. Not a one. Several have bullet holes in them, but none were downed.”

  “Thank you,” Ben said with a smile. “Go get yourself some food and rest.” After the Scout had left, Ben checked with Corrie on the other battalions. All were secure for the night. He poured a mug of coffee and stepped outside. Jersey slipped out right behind him, to stand several meters away, alert for trouble.

  On this night, Ben did not expect trouble in the form of a night attack from the outlaws. Although they could come at any time, he knew that sneak attacks were more likely later, when they were deep in northern British Columbia, where the timber and brush growing lush and thick on both sides of the road and the rolling hills and mountains would offer plenty of good cover for an ambush. That was when the gunships would prove invaluable.

  “Cold out here,” he muttered, his breath steaming in the fading light.

  Thermopolis walked up to join him. He, too, held a mug of coffee.

  “Got your people all settled in?” Ben asked.

  “Yes. Even Emil, thank God. Ever since we crossed over into Canada he’s been like a city kid exploring a country drainage ditch.”

  “Interesting analogy,” Ben said “But I know what you mean.”

  The men stood shoulder to shoulder for a moment, not speaking.

  Ben finally broke the silence, but when he spoke, it was in a whisper. “It’s too goddamn quiet, Therm.”

  “I know. I was thinking a few minutes ago—just before I walked up—that they wouldn’t be dumb enough to try an attack just yet. That they’d probably wait until we were all stretched out on some lonesome road.”

  “I was thinking the same thing.”

  Jersey was listening and said, “I’ll tell Corrie to bring everyone to high alert. You guys get your asses down and out of sight, damnit!”

  Therm smiled. “Not much respect for her elders there, but she has a good point.”

  “Maybe it’s a false feeling on our part. But just in case it isn’t, good luck.”

  “Same to you.”

  Therm walked away into the gathering gloom, and Ben stepped back into the house he was using that night.

  “Get everyone ready to cut all lights on my command,” Ben said, glancing at his watch. It would take Thermopolis about three minutes to get back to his battalion area. If an attack was imminent, it would come soon, for those watching would know the Rebels had just eaten and were relaxing.

  “Fools,” Ben muttered.

  “Beg pardon, Ben?” Linda looked at him.

  “We’re seventeen hundred strong here, with manned tanks and APCs all around our perimeter. They’re fools to try anything.”

  “They’re desperate people, General,” Cooper said, squatting by a window, his M-16 ready.

  “I don’t understand them,” Linda admitted “You did flyovers, dropping leaflets urging them to surrender. You told them that you’d help them turn their lives around, Ben. You offered them amnesty. Yet not one outlaw has offered to surrender. I don’t understand it.”

  “That’s the reason I was so hard on those people back in Summerland. Outlaws seldom change their ways. And these people are in their second decade of lawlessness. I got through to Junior back in the States. I scared him. And I think it will hold. Some of those outlaws out here in the night right now would probably make good citizens if I could talk to them. But they’re not going to give me that chance. So to hell with them.” He checked his watch then looked over at Corrie. “Give the order to ready the flares,” Ben said.

  She gave the orders and nodded at Ben.

  “Everything go dark in ten, Corrie. Count it down.”

  She counted to the mark, gave the orders, and the camp was plunged into darkness.

  Ben watched the luminous second hand on his watch. “Flares up.”

  The flares went up just as an outlaw tripped a perimeter banger wire, and that section was immediately torn apart by gunfire. The outlaw and those with him were torn into bloody chunks by the heavy machine-gun fire. Others, confident of their ability to move through the night, but not really knowing how the Rebels secured their camps, walked into Claymore-mined areas and were mangled by the deadly antipersonnel mines.

  But half a hundred outlaws had managed to penetrate the camp’s security. One made the mistake of throwing himself through a window of Ben’s quarters. Ben turned and gave him a burst from his Thunder Lizard. The .308 rounds lifted the man up on his tiptoes and knocked him back through the window he had just jumped through. He left a smear of blood on the dusty windowsill.

  “Light up the sky, Corrie.” Ben yelled to be heard over the rattle of gunfire. “Keep the flares going.”

  The Rebels would not move from their assigned positions; they would do that only after signaling by radio contact. So anything else that moved in the flare-filled night was fair game, and the Rebels took full advantage of their hard training.

  The fire-fight was brief and bloody and deadly . . . for the outlaws. The Rebels wore body armor and helmets that would stop nearly all standard pistol rounds and many rifle rounds. Ben Raines equipped his people with the best of everything and had his lab people constantly working to come up with new and better equipment.

  “Cease firing,” Ben ordered.

  The camp fell silent almost immediately. Then, gradually, the moaning of the many wounded began filling the cold air.

  “Patrols out,” Ben ordered. “Secure us but do not pursue the enemy. Everyone else stay in their holes. Get me a report from Eight Battalion.”

  “Everything is smooth over there, General,” Corrie told him.

  “All right, let’s see what we’ve got outside.”

  The Rebels began dragging the outlaw wounded to Chase’s medics, not always being very gentle about it. They knew that most of them were going to be shot or hanged anyway.

  Ben walked up to one outlaw, who had suffered only a minor wound, and pulled out his .45. He jacked the hammer back and put the muzzle against the man’s head. “You might live through a trial that will be conducted by J
on Andersen’s people, or you can die right now. The choice is yours to make. State your decision.”

  The outlaw was so scared he was trembling from his ankles to his shoulders. He knew he was facing a man who would kill him in a heartbeat. “I’ll take a trial,” he managed to stammer the words.

  “If I decide to give you one,” Ben told him. “I want all the information you have in that slimy brain of yours. You can do it voluntarily and live, or I’ll pump you so full of drugs you’ll be a vegetable when you come out of it. Either way, I’ll get the information. Do you understand that?”

  “Yes, sir! I’ll tell you anything you want to know. Anything at all.”

  “Get him out of here,” Ben ordered. “Interrogate him dry.”

  Some of the newer Rebels in Ben’s battalion exchanged glances. They’d been told what a hard-ass Ben Raines was, and some had not believed it. They believed it now.

  “The big hotshot Ben Raines,” an outlaw sneered at Ben from his position on the cold ground.

  Ben looked down at him. The man had been gut-shot and probably was not long for this world. “You got something on your mind, punk?”

  “Yeah. Seein’ you dead, you law-and-order son of a bitch!” The man jerked up his arm, a tiny .22 caliber derringer in his hand.

  Ben shot him between the eyes.

  One young outlaw, not much more than a teenager, started weeping as he lay on the ground. Ben walked over to him, stared down at him, and noted that his wounds were not much more than scratches.

  “Get up on your feet, damn you!” Ben told him.

  The boy crawled to his boots. Tears streaked his face and snot hung from his nose.

  “Blow your nose,” Ben told him. “You’re disgusting.”

  The young man honked into a dirty handkerchief. At least he didn’t blow his snot onto the ground, a habit that Ben had always felt was repulsive, unsanitary, and reserved solely for people who lacked consideration for the health of others.

  “What’s your name?” Ben asked.

  “Jerry Harris, sir.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Eighteen, I think, sir.”

  “How long have you been with this pack of trash?”

  “Nearabouts six months, sir.”

  “Why?”

  “I . . . beg your pardon, sir?”

  “Why did you join with this shit group?”

  The question seemed to confuse the young man. Finally, he said, “There ain’t no law, sir. Or there wasn’t ’til you come along. There ain’t no jobs, no future, no past, no nothing.”

  “That’s horseshit!” Ben snapped at him. “The future is anything you want to make it. You’re just a lazy, no-count punk, and that’s all you’ll ever be.”

  “I ain’t neither!” the young man flared, his eyes flashing.

  “Then prove it!” Ben roared at him.

  “How? You want me to get a job? Where, for God’s sake? Show me a factory, I’ll go to work. Show me a store that’s open for business. I’ll clerk in it. You . . .”

  Ben slapped him. The open-handed blow snapped the boy’s head to one side and bloodied his lips. “Don’t hand me excuses, boy. That’s cop-out bullshit. That sounds like some of the crap the so-called peace and love generation used to hand out—years before you were born. Tell me, what did you do before joining up with these outlaws?”

  “I . . . uh . . . stayed with my folks. We grew gardens and hunted and stuff like that.”

  “Where are your folks now?”

  “Dead, sir.”

  “How?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “They didn’t make the winter, sir. After Daddy died, Mama just give up.”

  “Are you feeding me a line of bullshit or are you telling me the truth?”

  “I ain’t about to lie to you, General Raines.”

  “How do you know my name?”

  “I seen pictures of you. There are carvins of you in the deep timber. Them that live in the woods worship you. General, after my folks died, I figured . . . well, what the hell? The whole world is upside down. Everything is all screwed up. What did my parents live for and what did they die for? You show me something to live for, General. Show me.”

  Ben spotted Thermopolis standing at the edge of the clearing. “You think you can show him, Therm?”

  The hippie-turned-warrior smiled. “Oh, I think so. Come on, Jerry. Life is worth a lot more than you think.”

  “You’re gonna have to convince me.”

  “Oh, I think I can. It’s easy when you take into consideration that if I can’t, Ben Raines is going to shoot you.”

  SIX

  The outlaws that attacked the camp of the Rebels took a terrible loss of life. All the prisoners agreed that the group suffered probably a fifty percent loss. Whether or not they were telling the truth was something else to be taken into consideration.

  Ben turned the prisoners over to Jon Andersen’s group and they were tried. Most of them were hanged. A few were horsewhipped and set free.

  Thermopolis persuaded Ben to let Jerry Harris come along with the Rebels. “He says he’s never killed anyone and I believe him,” Therm said. “And don’t try to con me, Ben; you like the kid or you would have turned him over for trial.”

  “I will agree that there might be more than a spark of decency in the boy,” Ben said.

  “Becoming liberal in your advancing age, Raines?” Doctor Chase asked with a chuckle.

  “Very funny,” Ben replied. “Mount up and let’s get gone from here. We’re wasting time.”

  “He doesn’t like me,” Jerry said, once Ben had walked away.

  “You’ve got to prove yourself with Ben,” Lamar told the young man. “You went bad and that’s two strikes against you from the get-go. Ben is law and order, boy. One hundred percent, all the way down the line. With the emphasis placed on order.”

  “I don’t understand,” Jerry said.

  “Ben Raines is the law, boy. His philosophy, his concepts, his interpretations. The administration of justice will never be as it was in the northern hemisphere. Two hundred years from now, when all of us are dust, the ideals that Ben Raines put forth will still be the base upon which the existing government functions. You’re a part of history in the making, son, so don’t screw it up.”

  All the Rebel battalions moved out, from Squamish in the west to Cranbrook in the eastern part of the state, all pushing north. The failed attack against Ben’s camp and the terrible casualties the outlaws suffered must have spread like a forest fire among the outlaws, for there were no more mass attacks against any Rebel battalion.

  The army of Rebels advanced slowly but steadily, sometimes making no more than twenty-five miles a day due to the bad roads and blown bridges and overpasses. They passed the point where the gunships had done their work, and it was a death-site of bloated and stinking bodies and jumbled rows of burned-out cars and trucks. The gunships had done in ten minutes what it would have taken Rebel ground troops all day to do, even with artillery. The Rebels picked through the rubble, salvaging weapons and ammo and other equipment. The Rebels never left anything behind that might someday be put to use.

  The Rebels pushed on toward Northstar.

  They found survivors along the way. Some ran away from the Rebels. Others straightened out the steel in their backbones and agreed to become a part of the movement.

  And far to the north of Ben’s army, the outlaw leaders who had once terrorized southern British Columbia met and tried to lay out plans to halt the advancing army.

  “We’re never going to halt them,” Dickie Momford said. “All we’re goin’ to do is maybe slow them down some. But we’ll never stop them.”

  “I don’t like that kind of talk,” Jack Hayes said.

  “I don’t give a damn what you like,” Dickie told him. “Step out of your dream world, Jack, and face reality. Huge armies have tried to stop Raines, armies with tanks and artillery and everything we don’t have. Raines and his Rebels stepped on them
like they was bugs and kept on comin’.”

  “He’s right,” Gil Brister said. “This is it for us, boys.”

  Art LeBarre looked at him through the smoke of the campfire. “What do you mean, Gil?”

  “He means,” an outlaw who called himself Turner said, “that this is our last shot. We either surrender, or we die. Them’s the onliest choices we got.”

  “Mighty slim chances,” Harris Orr said. He heated his coffee and spooned in a dollop of honey to cut the harshness of the brew. “Damned if we do and damned if we don’t, the way I see it.”

  “This ain’t his country,” Pat Brown bitched, “What’s he doin’ up here, anyways?”

  Turner chuckled. “This ain’t nobody’s country, Pat. Jist like it was two hundred years ago. It’s up for grabs, and Raines is gonna grab it.”

  “Well, what the hell’s he gonna do with it?” Peters asked.

  “Kill us, for one thing,” Momford said. “And I ain’t lookin’ forward to that day a-tall.”

  “Them ol’ boys that passed through a while back,” Jack Hayes said. “Villar and that dark-lookin’ man. Hot Fart or whatever he called hisself . . .”

  “Khansim,” Art said. “The A-rab. The Hot Wind. What about them?”

  “We could throw in with them. If we showed Raines enough force, he might be willin’ to make a deal.”

  Turner smiled and shook his head. “Raines don’t make no deals with criminals. You boys ain’t been studyin’ this man like I have over the years. Remember, boys, I come up from the U-nited States years back, runnin’ from Raines and his Rebels. Boys, this man took about five thousand Rebels into New York City and whupped about fifty thousand of them nasty, stinkin’ Night People, then destroyed the city. He took his Rebels and cut a path acrost America from border to border. That son of a bitch Raines has been shot a dozen times, he’s fell off mountains, he’s been captured, tortured, sentenced to death no tellin’ how many times, and he still keeps on comin’. He kilt Sam Hartline with his bare hands. He’s destroyed whole armies, right down to the last person. You can’t stop him; we can’t stop him; can’t nobody stop him.”