“He’s not going to want any bodyguards,” Mark said.
“No,” Tina agreed. “And if anyone tries to burden him with them, he’ll find a way to shake them.”
Cecil sighed. “Let’s face that when the time comes around, people. Right now, though, let’s all get some much-needed rest for a few hours. We’ve still got a lot to do.”
Ben halted his convoy at a motel complex just off Interstate 85 and ordered then to eat and rest. Everyone was beat, some near exhaustion. Ben looked as refreshed as if he’d just risen from an uninterrupted eight hours’ sleep.
After a cold meal, most of the Rebels unrolled their sleeping bags and bedrolls and crashed on the floor. They were asleep in five minutes, oblivious to the storm that raged outside the motel complex.
Ben and Gale, after tossing everything in the motel room outside, and checking the carpet for fleas and other vermin, inflated the air mattress and laid a double sleeping bag over the gentle firmness. Gale was sleeping in two minutes.
Ben stood just outside the closed motel room door, watching the lightning lick across the night sky, the wicked needles lancing furiously, bouncing and lashing through the low heavens.
Ben looked at the firmament. “Where is it all leading?” he questioned the night. “Are you going to give us one more chance, or is this your way of saying the human race has had it, all because we failed you?”
Thunder crashed and scolded the sodden ground; another burst of lightning flickered acidly, illuminating the lone man standing by the railing of the second floor. More thunder rolled, punishing the air with waves of fury.
“Sorry,” Ben said, “but this display further convinces me that you had a hand in all that happened.” Ben’s words were not audible over the howling fury. A line from a long-ago Tennessee Williams play came to him: Hypocrisy and mendacity. “That’s the way the world was leaning, right? Sure. Get drunk on Saturday night and dress up in finery on Sunday and go to church and pray for forgiveness at best, go to church for the show of it at worst. Cheat your friend, your neighbor, the customer, and fuck your best buddy’s wife. Right? Yeah. Buy expensive grown-up toys while half the world’s children starved to death and this nation’s elderly had to grub around in garbage cans just to survive. That is, if the summer’s heat or the winter’s cold or the damned street punks didn’t kill them—right?”
The worst and harshest slash of lightning Ben had ever seen lit up the entire sky. The sulfuric display was followed by a deafening crash of thunder. More lightning danced from cloud to cloud and from cloud to earth.
Ben stood undaunted and unafraid and alone on the balcony. “What are You attempting to tell us, or me?” Ben questioned the almost mindless fury of the storm. “Or are You trying to say anything at all? Do You even exist? Or were You just a figment of someone’s vivid imagination thousands of years ago?”
The earth trembled under the barrage of God’s wrath.
Ben stood with his face to the heavens—and toward Him. “All right, all right,” he said. “What’s the matter; can’t You take a joke?”
The lightning and thunder ceased abruptly, the rain picking up in volume.
“That won’t do it,” Ben said. “I don’t believe in miracles, and the rain alone won’t wash it clean. Hundreds of years must pass before portions of this earth—Your earth—will once more be inhabitable. I believe You allowed the disaster to happen. Now what are You trying to do, ease your conscience?”
The lightning and thunder began anew.
Ben laughed. “I’m not afraid of You. I respect You. But I’m not afraid of You. I’ll tell You what: I think You’ve given up on this planet. That is my belief. I have always believed this planet earth was only one of many You populated with beings. And now You have turned Your attention to others. Fine. I don’t blame You a bit. Now I don’t know about this fellow called the Prophet who is wandering about, following me. I don’t know what he’s trying to tell me. But I do know this: I am not the man to restore Your earth. A little part of it, maybe. But the rest is up to You. So get off my back. I’m tired. I’m going to wander for a year. Maybe longer. Alone. Leave the machinery of government and building nations in someone else’s hands. Cecil Jefferys. He’s a good man. One of the best I’ve ever seen.”
The lightning and thunder and driving rain eased off a bit.
“Interesting,” Ben noted aloud. “I’ve had some strange conversations in my time, but this takes the cake.”
A lone spear of lightning touched down.
“All right,” Ben said. “It’s pure survival from this point on, isn’t it? Sure. Little pockets of determined people will set up fortresslike villages and try to pull something constructive from the ashes. Maybe they‘ll—we’ll succeed. I’ve got something like that in the back of my mind. After I return from my wanderings. I think we’ve got maybe a seventy/thirty chance of success. With us on the low end of the odds scale.”
The rain had dwindled down to a sprinkle; the lightning had completely stopped.
“All right,” Ben spoke to that which only he could hear at that moment. “Fine.”
He walked back into the motel room, undressed, and lay down beside Gale. She turned to face him in the darkness.
“I thought I heard you talking to someone, Ben.”
“You did. I was carrying on a sort of conversation with God.”
Several moments of silence passed. “Really?” she finally said. “Did He reply to your mutterings?”
“Well, yes. In a manner of speaking.”
“Sometimes I worry about you, Raines. I really, really do.”
She rose from the pallet and wandered around the barren room.
“What in the hell are you looking for?” Ben asked. He was thoughtful for a moment. “Don’t tell me; let me guess: You’re hungry.”
In reply, she bit deeply into the crisp tartness of an apple.
TWENTY-SIX
The savage torrents of rain and storm blew past the town of McCormick, South Carolina, in the early morning hours. But the raging passage had also concealed the movements of Sam Hartline’s men as they slipped silently into position in the town. With practiced ease, the mercenaries planted explosives around the town, enough explosives to flatten three towns the size of McCormick.
Easy, Hartline thought, smiling in the night. Raines has become so confident he’s let his guard down.
The top mercenary knew that happened to the best of people at times. He remembered the time when he’d had one of Raines’ women, Jerre, the blond beauty. He, too, had become overconfident and let his guard down. That moment of carelessness had almost cost Hartline his life.10
He remembered it with bitterness and hate on his tongue.
Smiling, he lifted his walkie-talkie. “Now!” Hartline whispered hoarsely into the speaker cup.
The small town of McCormick blew apart from the massive charges of explosives planted in key locations. The gasoline in the cars and vans and trucks of Tony Silver and the men of the Ninth Order ignited and blew, sending flames leaping into the air and illuminating the now clear and starry night.
Bits and pieces of bodies were hurled through broken windows to land in a sprawl on the littered street. Great bloody chunks of once human beings were flung about like damp bits of papier-mâché. Ropelike strands of intestines coiled and steamed in the fall coolness. Screaming, mortally wounded men crawled about on the street, yelling for help, watching their life’s blood pour from them. Heads without bodies bounced and rolled on the concrete.
As the men being attacked fought their way out of sleep and fear and confusion, reaching for their weapons and their pants, running out into the streets, they were chopped to bloody shards of flesh by heavy machine gunfire. AKs and M-16s and M-60s and heavy .50-caliber slugs ripped and tore and spun the men around to fall in dead heaps on the concrete.
“No prisoners!” Hartline yelled over his walkie-talkie. “Kill them all except Ben Raines. I want to shoot that son of a bitch personally.
”
“Ben Raines!” One of Silver’s men lifted his head to look at Hartline through the blood dripping from a massive head wound. “But Ben Raines ain’t—”
He never got to finish his sentence. A .45 slug from one of Hartline’s men put the final period to the man’s life.
The firefight was short and bloody and savage. And totally without mercy. Sam Hartline’s men took no prisoners. They hunted down the wounded and those few who had escaped the initial carnage and shot them.
Just as dawn was pushing silver gray into the eastern skies, Sam Hartline, cigar clamped between strong, even white teeth, walked the streets, inspecting the bloody havoc he had ordered. Hartline snorted his disgust as he walked up and down each stinking, bloody street that had housed what he had assumed to be Raines’ Rebels.
“I should have known better,” he muttered. “Goddamnit, I should have known better.”
Hartline’s final smile before he reluctantly accepted what had happened was anything but pleasant.
“The lucky son of a bitch did it to me again,” Hartline said.
“What do you mean, Sam?” his second-in-command asked.
“It was too easy. Just too easy. I should have spotted it. But I didn’t. Who in the fuck are these people?” He threw the question at anyone who might know the answer.
His men stood around him, bewildered expressions on their faces.
“Look at the condition of these weapons,” Hartline said, pointing to an M-16. “You think Ben Raines would allow a weapon that filthy? Hell, no, he wouldn’t. Look at the clothing. Raines’ Rebels wear tiger stripe, black, or leaf cammies. These yo-yos are dressed in anything they can find. Shit! In short, people, we hit the wrong bunch.”
Captain Jennings, his second-in-command, was incredulous. “Well, who in the hell are these people, then?”
Hartline shrugged. “Damned if I know. I’d guess the bunch Raines was fighting when we intercepted the radio messages. No telling where Raines got off to.”
“Well,” Captain Jennings struggled to find something bright out of the butcher job. “At least this gives us fewer people to have to worry about fighting at some later date. Right, Sam?”
Hartline laughed and punched the man lightly on the upper arm. “Right, Jennings. I knew I could count on you to find something of value out of this mistaken identity.”
“So what now, Sam? Do we chase Raines?”
Hartline thought about that for a few seconds. He shook his head. “No. If I know Ben Raines, and believe me, I do, he won’t be using any long-range radio transmissions. So we’d be chasing the wind just trying to determine where he is or where he’s going. Let’s head south. We’ll break the good news to Mr. Tony Silver about the misfortune that befell his little army. Without his strong-arm boys to back him up, I think Mr. Silver should be quite easily persuaded to join our ranks.”
“I’m told he’s got the market cornered on young chicks,” Jennings said with an ugly, anticipatory smile.
Sam felt a warmth spread throughout his groin. The images of moaning young girls and firm flesh and tight pussies filled his head. Just the thought of inflicting pain excited him. “Yes,” he said, returning the smile. “So I understand.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
Ben’s convoy reached Highway 76 and edged west by northwest, traveling slowly, with heavily armed Scouts spearheading the way. They saw a few signs of life passing through Seneca, in western South Carolina, but the smoke from cooking fires coming from chimneys was all they saw. Ben made no attempt to contact any of those inside the closed and shuttered homes.
At Westminster the convoy swung still further north and moved into the mountains, again entering another part of the Sumter National Forest, edging toward the Chattahoochee National Forest, an immense tract of mountainous terrain that stretched for almost a hundred miles across the top of Georgia. The Rebels crossed the Chattoga River and Ben ordered the column halted for the noon meal and some rest at a town called Clayton.
“A hundred and fifteen miles to go, people,” Ben told his contingent. “Approximately. But we’re going to take our time getting there. We’re going to keep our heads up and stay alert. This is Ninth Order territory, so be alert for ambushes. When we get up to Lake Chatuge, up near the North Carolina border, we’ll contact Base Camp. See what’s shaking down there. If they can tell us we’re close to the headquarters of the Ninth Order, we may just wait there for more troops and just go on and wipe that bunch of nuts from the face of the earth. We’ll just have to wait and see. For now, you people get some food in you and take a rest.”
“Like I said, Raines,” Gale told him. “You get off on combat. When did you get your first gun as a child?”
“When I was about six months old,” Ben said with a straight face.
“Come on, Raines! Will you get serious?”
“I am serious. I literally cut my teeth chewing on the barrel of my great grandfather’s old Civil War .44. It was a Remington, I think.”
“I believe it, Raines. I really believe it.” She walked away, muttering, toward the chow line.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Ike failed to see the huge hole in the old highway and the right front wheel dropped off into the weather-rutted pothole, slamming both him and Nina around in the cab. Both of them heard metal popping and both began cussing.
Then they saw the entire wheel, with tire intact, go rolling down the old highway.
Nina said some very unladylike words, ending with, “Well, Ike, I guess it’s back to walking.”
Ike looked at the right front of the pickup. There was no repairing this damage. Ike said a few choice words and pulled the pickup out of the road, parking it on the shoulder.
Both of them looked at the highway marker on the right side of the road. BLAIRSVILLE. The mileage was unreadable, but it had been a single number.
“At best it’s one mile,” Ike said. “The worst it can be is nine miles.”
Ike was thoughtful for a moment, then checked the old map. “I got a hunch, Nina. Let’s forget about Blairsville and head for this lake up near the North Carolina border.”
“Why there?” she questioned. “Won’t we be going away from Base Camp?”
“Yeah. But like I said: I got a hunch. You game?”
“I’m with you, Ike.”
The pair gathered up what they could carry and began trudging up the center of the road, Ike bitching with each step.
TWENTY-NINE
A huge hole had been scraped out of the damp earth and the bagged bodies of the men, women and children killed in the coup attempt were carefully laid in the excavation. The earth began claiming them as the bulldozers covered the silent shapes of friends, wives and husbands, lovers, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters.
Those men and women who had sided with Captain Willette. in the coup attempt were placed in another pit far away and covered with earth. Their final resting place would go unnoticed and unmarked.
Cecil read several passages from the Bible as he stood over the raw earth. The names of those killed had been given to the stone mason and he was working at his laborious task. It would be weeks, perhaps months, before all the names were cut into several large stones.
Cecil closed his Bible, shook his head at the tragedy of it all, and walked away from the grave site. A runner from the communications shack found him and handed him a message.
“It’s from that fellow that General Raines told us about,” the runner said. “That Harner fellow down in Macon.”
Cecil looked at the handwritten message. “Have word that a large force of mercenaries destroyed Tony Silver’s army along with most of the troops of the Ninth Order who had been in combat with General Raines’ Rebels in South Carolina. Have word that slave revolts occurring on many of Silver’s work farms in both north Florida and south Georgia. Still about five hundred of Silver’s army left and about that many men of the Ninth Order. A full platoon of Silver’s men camped just east of the ruins of Atlanta, arou
nd Stone Mountain. We skirted them this morning and are proceeding toward your Base Camp. Will arrive camp area noon tomorrow. Harner.”
“Slave revolt!” Cecil said, folding the paper and tucking it in his pocket. “Dear God. Slaves! I thought all that ended about 1865.”
“It’s a big land, Cec,” Dan Gray told him. “We really don’t know what is happening out there.” He waved a hand.
“Yes,” Cecil replied. He looked south. His eyes were bleak. “I can but wish the slaves the best of luck.”
“I wish we had the personnel to help,” Dan said.
“So do I, friend. So do I.”
THIRTY
“No reply from any of our people up north,” Tony was informed. “And I’ve been trying to contact them all day. What do you think it means, Tony?”
“I think it means they’ve bought it,” Tony said.
“Yeah.”
Tony slumped back in his chair. That feeling of impending doom he’d been experiencing all day once more settled around him like a damp, stinking shroud. And he couldn’t seem to shake it. Not even liquor would dull the sensation.
“Any further word from north Florida?” Tony asked.
“Yeah. All bad. The big plantation down at Live Oak was completely overrun by the slaves. I don’t know how they got them guns. The last report we received, the guards had barricaded themselves in the radio building. You could hear all sorts of shootin’. Then the radio went dead. So I guess them guys bought it, too.”
“How bad’s our strength been cut?”
The man shook his head. “Well, if our guys up in South Carolina bought it, that means we lost sixty, seventy percent, Tony. But a full company got out of Perry. They’re headin’ up this way.”
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