Chaos in the Ashes

by William W. Johnstone

  Ben smiled. “You can’t prevent me from inspecting my own troops, Lamar. No matter where they might be. That is any commander’s right.”

  “Raines,” the doctor said, knowing Ben had him on that point. “You’re a prick!”

  At the time, Ben really had no intention of visiting Buddy, or any of the other special ops troops. He just wanted to stick the needle to Lamar. But the more he thought about traveling over to Indiana, the better the idea sounded.

  Zandar had approximately four divisions of twenty-five hundred troops per division. Eyes in the Sky reported that about two thousand of Cugumba and Mobutomamba’s troops had stayed with Zandar. Twelve thousand troops spread out north to south over about three hundred miles, along Highway 31.

  “Let’s end it,” Ben muttered. “Zandar is not going to quit.” He called for Corrie. “Pull in Ike, West, and Georgi. Get the tanks rolling. Put all fixed-wing and chopper gunships on alert. Order Dan and Buddy to cease immediately all guerrilla action, form up their battalions, and start gradually falling back. Prepare to throw up a defensive line along Interstates 69 and 65. Buddy’s 8 Batt at the top, Georgi’s 5 Batt to the extreme south end. The placement will be Buddy, Dan, us, Rebet, Danjou, Ike, West, and Georgi. I’m tired of dicking around with this guy, Corrie. Let’s go bump heads.”

  Zandar had ordered the guards tripled at night—and still the infiltrators were slipping through and doing their deadly work. But it was not demoralizing his people. Zandar personally saw to that. Then the throat-cutting abruptly stopped.

  Zandar was filled with hate, but he was far from being a stupid man. Actually, his IQ was very high. He just never did much with that intelligence . . . except hate white people.

  But the ceasing of the infiltrators puzzled him. Why go to all that trouble, and then suddenly pull back?

  His forward teams had reported that the Rebels were pulling back. They had withdrawn to Highway 15 and were still falling back toward the east.

  Why?

  Was Raines giving up?

  Despite his shining arrogance, Zandar considered that highly unlikely.

  An aide broke into his thoughts. “Sir? Ben Raines has made contact with us. He wishes to speak to you.”

  Zandar stared at the aide for a moment, then stood up and walked to the communications room.

  “Hey, Zandar! Are you there, asshole?” The voice of Ben Raines sprang out of the speaker.

  Zandar froze in shock. Nobody spoke to him in such a manner.

  “Hey, prick-face.” Ben’s voice was taunting. “Pick up the damn mic and speak. Oh, you have to press that little button on the side to talk, in case you haven’t figured it out yet. And as stupid as you are, you probably haven’t.”

  Zandar snatched up the mic and shouted, “This is Colonel Zandar!”

  “Colonel?” Ben’s voice was filled with sarcasm. “Colonel? Hell, boy, you wouldn’t make a pimple on a real colonel’s ass. You’re nothing but a goddamn sleazy street punk.”

  “What do you want, Raines?” Zandar shouted.

  “Your black ass, boy.”

  Hundreds of miles away, Issac was listening to the transmission. “He’s deliberately taunting you, Zandar. And you haven’t got enough sense to understand that. You’re a damn fool if you fall for this trick.”

  “You honky son-of-a-bitch!” Zandar shouted.

  “I have about a hundred acres of cotton down south that needs pickin’. I figure that’s about all you’re good for. I’ll feed you lots of greens and fatback and cornbread.”

  “Fuck you, Raines!” Zandar was livid with rage.

  Cugumba and Mobutomamba were also listening to the transmission. They exchanged glances and both shook their heads. Ben Raines was playing Zandar like a puppet on a string.

  “I’ll kill you, Raines!” Zandar screamed out his rage.

  “How?” Ben responded. “You gonna hit me with a chitlin’, boy?”

  Zandar finally got it. He had almost fallen for Ben’s taunting. He took several deep breaths and calmed himself. He keyed the mic. “Very good, Raines. Excellent. You had me going there for a time. But I won’t fall for your race-baiting. You are not a racist, Raines. I know that for a fact. I hate your guts, but you are not a racist. Now what do you want?”

  “Very well, Zandar, or whatever the hell your name is. We can do this easy, or hard. It’s up to you. Lay down your arms and disband your army. Make a life for yourself and your followers. Live a long time. This is the only warning I’m going to give you. Butt heads with me, and you’re a dead man. You understand all that?”

  “Raines, go right straight to hell. I’m going to destroy you.”

  “Then you really are a fool, Zandar. Better men than you have tried that. I’m still around.”

  “I will meet you in combat and defeat you, Raines.”

  “OK, sucker. Come on.”

  Ben broke the transmission.

  “Arrogant son-of-a-bitch!” Zandar said.

  Ben handed the mic to Corrie and winked at Jersey.

  “Kick-ass time!” Jersey said.

  SEVEN

  Zandar was soldier enough to see that if he pulled his troops together en masse and smashed through any part of the Rebel line, Ben’s troops would just fall in behind him and he’d be no better off than before. Ruefully, Zandar realized he had to meet Ben Raines on his terms.

  Both armies were now facing each other in company-sized groups, or smaller.

  Ben had placed his heavy artillery well back from the several miles of No Man’s Land that separated the two armies, and the Rebel tanks were close in and carefully placed and camouflaged.

  The Rebels waited for Zandar to make the first move.

  But Zandar had turned suddenly cautious. Ben Raines had called his hand and was waiting for him to either bet his cards or fold.

  It was purely unintentional, but Zandar and Ben were facing each other at the junction of Interstate 69 and Highway 18, just east of Marion, Indiana.

  “That’s Zandar facing us,” Corrie said to Ben. “Scouts just confirmed it.”

  Ben nodded his head then checked his watch. “Wonder what he’s waiting on? It’s well past dawn.”

  Zandar was pacing the ground. His people were in place, waiting for his orders. The time was now. He could not wait Ben out; he didn’t have the supplies for that. Many of his people were living off the land as it was and supplies were critical. The realization came to him in a rush: Ben Raines knew all that. The Rebels were well-fed, well supplied, and waiting like a fat cat for a mouse to come out of its hole.

  “The son of a bitch!” Zandar cursed.

  Another hot rush of realization flooded Zandar. If he ordered his troops forward, it would be suicide. The Rebels would chop them to bloody pieces. Zandar looked up into the blue of the Indiana sky. No planes, no helicopter gunships. Oh, hell, no. Raines was holding them back until Zandar ordered his people across the three miles of empty, then they would swoop down like huge mechanical carrion birds, spitting out death.

  Zandar was many things. But he was no fool. There was no way for him to win. Just . . . no . . . way . . . at . . . all.

  Zandar sat down on a camp stool and put his face in his hands. He just could not give the orders to sacrifice his troops. The punks and thugs he’d gathered along the way had vanished like smoke in a breeze when the Rebels started their murderous nighttime guerrilla tactics. Those bloody death-grinning heads up on poles had really done it for the punks. They had disappeared in a rush after one look at that hideous sight. Just recalling it left Zandar with a queasy feeling in his stomach.

  Zandar finally admitted something else, too: from the moment he first saw those bloody heads stuck up on poles, he had known the war was lost, had realized then he was not going to defeat the Rebels. All his talk had been just that: so much hot air from the mouth.

  “When do we attack, sir?” An aide broke into his thoughts.

  Zandar looked up at the young man. He shook his head. “We don’t,
” he whispered.

  “Sir?”

  “Order all troops to stand down. I’m not going to turn this ground red with our blood. It’s pointless. Get me Ben Raines on the horn.”

  “Zandar on the blower, boss,” Corrie said, handing Ben the mic.

  “Colonel,” Ben said.

  “General Raines. If we lay down our arms, will you let us surrender in dignity?”

  “Of course, I will. I’ll do more than that. We’ll help you get settled in somewhere and help you out with food for the coming winter.”

  “You would help us with all that?”

  “Sure. Why not? We’re no longer enemies, are we?”

  Zandar felt his eyes burn with a mist. He keyed the mic. “No, General Raines. No. We are no longer enemies.”

  “Good. Have you had breakfast?”

  “Why . . . ah, no, I haven’t.”

  “I’ll send a Hummer over for you. We’ll talk about getting you folks settled in over a hot meal.”

  “I’ll be waiting.” After Ben had signed off, Zandar stood for a moment. Finally, he shook his head. “I just don’t understand that man. I wonder if anybody really knows what Ben Raines is all about?”

  In the span of twenty-four hours, the state of Missouri was reborn and became a part of the SUSA, Zandar and his troops began making plans to resettle all over the Midwest (with many of them expressing a desire to relocate in the SUSA), and a major battle was avoided without having to fire a shot.

  Indiana was declared clean and another state was added to President Altman’s NUSA.

  “Ben Raines can do more in three months than the entire federal government could do in three decades,” Paul Altman remarked.

  The western third of Ohio had been purged of the criminal element (for the most part) but the eastern two-thirds was quite another matter. The punks and thugs and assorted human crud, including the Night People, were running out of places to hide, as the advancing Rebels were slowly pushing them back into the northeast corridor.

  “It’s been relatively easy so far,” West, the mercenary and commander of 4 Batt, remarked at a meeting of batt coms. “But now comes the hard part.”

  “What about West Virginia?” Jim Peters, commander of 14 Batt asked. “It’s a damn battleground.”

  “I don’t want to get bogged down in that state,” Ben said. “That’s the last thing I want. Old blood feuds erupting, race wars popping up all over the place, old union members against old non-union factions shooting at each other. It’s madness. I know there are thousands of good, decent people living there—existing is probably a better word. But we’ll just avoid that state for the time being.”

  “How about this winter, Ben?” Ike asked.

  “We’ll keep going as long as we can. But our meteorologists are predicting a bad winter here in the north. Shifting over to a more pleasant subject, Cecil tells me he’s received documents from Simon Border detailing a non-aggression pact and an agreement of cooperation and trade between our two nations. North America just might be headed toward the road to peace after all.”

  “You always did predict we would break up into nations within a nation,” Jim Peters said. “Even before the Great War, that was the way you said we’d eventually go.”

  Ben smiled at that. Those books he’d written before the Great War had gotten him into trouble with the federal government. The FBI had put him on their subversives list and launched an investigation on him that had still been on-going when the Great War toppled every government on the face of the earth. That investigation had the FBI snooping and prowling into every aspect of his life, from the cradle on. One friend who had been interviewed several times by the Feds told Ben the Bureau had a dossier on him that was about six inches thick. Such was the paranoia of the liberals in power at the time. At one point in the investigation, the Bureau strongly suspected that Ben was the leader of a huge underground army of guerrillas, whose goal was to undermine and finally overthrow the government.

  When Ben learned of that, he was amused for days.

  With the nation awash in every type of crime imaginable, the government had spent several million dollars investigating a writer of popular fiction.

  Ben had once pointed out the absurdity of that to the FBI agents who visited him.

  The Bureau had not been amused.

  The Rebels began their march toward the Northeast, but now it was much slower going. The thugs and punks knew they were being pushed up into a box from which there was little chance of escape, and they were fighting like cornered wildcats.

  Cecil had the ring of missiles around the SUSA fully operational and the home guard was once more built up and ready to defend the SUSA should the rabble try again to overrun their borders—something no one believed would ever again occur. He released the battalions that had been stationed in the SUSA and Batts 16, 17, and 21 joined the Rebels in the field.

  Just as Ben’s 1 Batt and four other battalions were getting into position to strike against the ruins of Cleveland, Akron, and Canton, winter reared up several weeks early and laid a blanket of ice and snow over the land.

  “Dig in and stay warm,” Ben told his troops. “It’ll warm up before long. This storm is a freak of nature. It’s far too early for it to last.”

  But Ben also knew the punks would take the opportunity to split. The gangs they were dealing with now were the more intelligent ones: smarter, tougher, larger, better-equipped. They had lasted for years, and for most of the gangs, that was not based on luck, but on brains. Ben knew that most criminals, had they applied their intelligence to legal and legitimate endeavors, would be highly successful men and women.

  “From now on,” Ben said to his team one freezing cold day in late October, “it’s going to be down and dirty. Scouts are reporting the three cities are virtual ghost towns. Except, of course, for you all know who.”

  Mass groans greeted that.

  “That’s right,” Ben said. “Our old friends, the creepies. We can always count on them to be very predictable.”

  Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus, Springfield—all had been deserted cities when the Rebels pushed through—except for bands of creepies.

  “Ben,” Ike stood up. “What’s this about you and your 1 Batt heading down south and pushing east through Wheeling?”

  “That’s my plan. Why?”

  “Well, Ben, in case you haven’t looked at a map lately, Wheeling is in West Virginia. And Wheeling, according to Scouts, is a battleground.” Ike was one of only a few officers who could talk to Ben in such a manner.

  Ben laughed at the expression on Ike’s face. “I’m going to Pittsburgh, Ike. And I’m going to come up from the south. Dan is going straight in from Weirdton, and Buddy is coming in from the north. If the bands of malcontents in Wheeling want a fight, we’ll give them one. Right now, let’s start clearing out the creeps in Cleveland.”

  Corrie stuck her head into the room. “We got a problem, boss. Emil Hite is missing.”

  “Missing? He’s supposed to be inspecting playgrounds. What’d he do, get tangled up in a swing?”

  “He probably wishes he had. Seems as though Emil found a bunch of his old followers, among others. They decided that we might need some help up here—”

  “Oh, shit!” Ike muttered.

  “The last anyone heard from him, he and his . . . ah . . . well, followers had crossed the border into West Virginia. By the way, the group is about two hundred strong and call themselves the Rainbow Warriors.”

  Dan Gray groaned at that.

  Ben sighed. “OK, Corrie. See if you can find out how well armed the, ah, Rainbow Warriors are.”

  “They’re very well armed, boss. They tried to steal some tanks, but no one could figure out how to drive them. But they did leave in APCs and Hummers and deuce-and-a-halves, and they took plenty of supplies.”

  Ben smiled. “There are any number of punks and thugs and assorted trash who made the mistake of not taking Emil and his people seriously. We helped bur
y a lot of them. Emil and two hundred followers could put up a hell of a fight. I sort of feel sorry for anyone who tangles with them. Corrie, try to get a frequency fix on Emil. All right, let’s revamp our schedule. Here’s what I’m going to do . . .”

  “Where in the name of all that’s holy are we?” Emil asked.

  Emil and a dozen of his Rainbow Warriors were standing in the middle of the cracked old highway, looking at maps. Not that the maps would do them much good, for all the highway markers were long gone.

  “Lost,” one of his followers said mournfully.

  “Well, I know that!” Emil said. “But does anyone know approximately where we might be?”

  “West Virginia,” another of his people said.

  Emil looked heavenward and shook his head.

  Emil and his Rainbow Warriors were deep in West Virginia. How they had managed to get that far without someone taking a shot at them would forever remain a mystery. But all that was about to change—abruptly.

  The men and women of the Rainbow Warriors had started out with good intentions: to assist Ben Raines in clearing the country of hoodlums and criminals. Getting hopelessly lost in West Virginia was definitely not part of the plan.

  “I think someone should climb a tall tree and take a look around,” a man suggested.

  Emil turned slowly to stare at the man. “Climb a tree? What a brilliant idea, Rolf. Superb. Why don’t you do that? I mean, take your choice of trees. We’re surrounded by millions of them. Might I suggest that one.” Emil pointed toward a high mountain. “It will only take you a week to get up there. Now shut up with this tree business. What happened to all the damn road signs?”

  Emil, a former con man who had linked up with Ben some years back, always meant well. Even when he was running a scam, professing to be a holy man in perfect harmony with the Great God Blomm . . .

  “I’m cold,” a woman said.

  “Go sit in the truck, dear,” Emil told her.

  Emil then drew himself up to his full height, which was only a few inches above five feet, and looked all around him. Never one to conform to Rebel dress codes, for this foray into the unknown Emil had chosen low quarter shoes, a nice dress suit with matching tie, and a snap-brim 1940s-style Bogart hat. He wore a trench coat over the suit. But while Emil looked just about as ridiculous as a person could look—considering the time and place—he was far from being stupid. He had survived on his wits for years, getting out of more jams than Dick Tracy.