Blood in the Ashes

by William W. Johnstone

  “Ben Raines and his Rebs musta circled around,” Tony said.

  “Yeah, boss. He’s a sneaky bastard, that one is.”

  But Tony didn’t believe it was Raines who had wiped out his people and the troops of the Ninth Order. Tony did not possess second sight, but he could tell when things were going sour.

  “It wasn’t Raines,” Tony said. “I been kiddin’ myself about that.”

  “What do you mean, boss? If it wasn’t Raines, then who in the hell was it? You don’t think maybe it was them Russians, do you? Last word we got all them folks was out west.”

  “No, I don’t think it was the Russians. We’ve had no reports of them being anywhere near here. But I sure would like to know who the son of a bitch was that zapped my men.”

  “Why, my good fellow,” a voice came from the open doorway. “Regrettably, I did.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  Ike lifted the walkie-talkie and listened. From the strength of the transmission, he figured he and Nina must be practically sitting on top of the Ninth Order’s headquarters.

  Together, they listened in silence. When the transmissions had concluded, Ike summed it up, speaking more to himself than to her. “So the soldiers sent down south were wiped out, to a man, along with several hundred troops of this guy Silver.” He looked at Nina. “You know anything about this guy named Silver?”

  “He’s a whore-master. He is just as evil as Sister Voleta, in his own way. I’ve never seen him, but I’ve heard stories about him. He keeps slaves to work his farms. He has—” she pursed her lips—“oh, I heard about a half dozen farms and ranches down south, in Florida. And he likes young girls. I mean, real young girls. Eleven and twelve, that young. He likes to hurt them during the . . . sex. He has several hundred women of all ages in whorehouses around the country. Young boys, too. And he supplies women and girls and boys to warlords around the country, too. ”

  Ike looked at her, a dozen questions on his lips. “Warlords, Nina? Tell me more. Where have I been to have missed all this?”

  “You really don’t know about the warlords, Ike? You’re not just funnin’ me?”

  “No, I’m not funnin’ you, honey. You see, we were kinda isolated—the Rebels—for almost a decade.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Isolated?”

  “No. Decade.”

  “About ten years.”

  “Oh. Well, warlords is kinda like in some of them books I read. Back in the olden times, I mean. This one man, he gets hisself a bunch of other men together, and they stake out a certain parcel of land. So many miles thisaway, and so many miles thataway. Him and the men control all that by force. All the land is hisn.”

  “His, baby. His. Not hisn.”

  “His,” she corrected herself. “Anyways, all the people within the land claimed by the guy pay him for protection. Whether they wants to or not. They ain’t got no choice in the matter. If they don’t pay, the warlord kills them. They’s all kinds of them people spread out acrost the land. You really didn’t know, did you, Ike?”

  “No,” Ike said softly. “No, I didn’t. But it doesn’t surprise me. I ...” he sighed. “I guess I should have expected something like it. You’ve traveled around the country quite a bit, haven’t you, Nina?”

  Her face brightened in recall. “Oh, yeah! I sure have, Ike. I been all over. I been all the way up to the big water the Indians call ... what was it them Indians called it? Oh, yeah, I remember now. Gitche Gumee. I been—”

  “The what?” Ike looked at her, a very startled expression on his face. “What did you just say? Gitche Gumee?”

  “Yeah. Ain’t you never heard of that before, Ike?”

  “Why . . . sure I have! It’s from Longfellow’s ‘Song of Hiawatha.’ Oh. OK. You must be talking about Lake Superior?”

  She cocked her head and looked strangely at him. “I don’t know nothing about that, Ike. You see, there ain’t no white folks up where I went. It’s all Indians. That land belongs to them, so they said. And I sure as hell wasn’t gonna argue with ’em none. They didn’t hurt me a bit. They was real friendly and kind. Give me a bed to sleep in and warm food. And then the next morning, they showed me around the lake and their camp. Tepees and all that. Just like the old times in the books I read. But they called the big water Gitche Gumee. I don’t know and never heard of nobody named Hiawatha. Why don’t you tell me about him?”

  “Well.” Ike opened his mouth, then promptly shut it. No point in confusing her, and that would be just about all he would accomplish. Longfellow cast Hiawatha as an Ojibway. But in truth, he was based on the exploits of the Iroquois tribe. That in itself would probably boggle the girl’s mind. Ike sighed heavily. Shit! he thought. Hiawatha, you are just going to have to wait a spell.

  Nina looked at the expression on Ike’s face. “You’re sad with me, aren’t you, Ike? I done something wrong.”

  “No, no!” Ike looked at her and smiled. “No, I’m not sad or mad with you, Nina. Not at all. I’ll tell you the story of Hiawatha someday. I promise. Right now, though, I’d like for you to tell me about these warlords. How many have you seen or heard of?”

  “Oh, golly, Ike.” She shrugged. “Bunches and bunches of them. That’s what this here Sister Voleta is, kind of. But she’s really weird. Up north of here, right on the edge of the big mountains, is a guy name of Joe Blue. He’s a mean bastard, but he ain’t evil like Sister Voleta. Blue’ll just shoot you if he takes it in his head. But he’ll do it clean. Blue claims . . . oh, four, five counties. All the way from Johnson City clear up into Virginia. There’s another feller named Henshaw over to Boone in North Carolina claims a lot of land, too. I mean, a right smart piece of ground. Up in Kentucky now, over to the Daniel Boone Forest, all that is claimed by a man and woman named Red and Nola. They’re crazy, I think. To the east, now, I traveled as far as the big water would let me. I got captured by these men call themselves the Brunswick Vigilantes. They claim all the land for miles up and down the big water. That’s the . . .” She was thoughtful. “Yeah! The Atlantic. Them men didn’t hurt me none, but they sure made it plain they wasn’t happy to see me. They gimmie some food and told me to leave and don’t come back. And to warn others not to venture—that’s the word they used—over in that part of the country. Oh, Ike, I seen warlords near‘bouts ever’where I been the past two, three years. ”

  Ike sat silent for a few moments, deep in thought. So Ben was right, he reflected. As usual. Ben said it would come to this. The survivors are spinning backward in time much faster than our ancestors progressed. Somehow, someway, we—and it’s going to be up to men and women my age—must put the brakes on this backward slide.

  But how?

  “Education,” he said aloud.

  “What’d you say, Ike?”

  “Education, honey. That’s the key. Education. Unlike what was advocated back in the sixties and seventies and eighties, there must be one type of education for everybody, regardless of race or religion or whatever. It’s that kind of shittiest-assed thinking that helped get us in the shape we’re in now. But if you said anything back then, you were immediately branded a racist,”

  “Ike, what in the hell are you talkin’ about? I don’t understand nothin’ you just said.”

  “Let me put it this way, Nina. You know anything about mules?”

  “Hell, yes. Horses, too.”

  “Well, then, if you was to put two males in harness, and one wanted to go gee and the other wanted to go haw, you wouldn’t get a whole hell of a lot of plowin’ done, would you?”

  “Any fool knows the answer to that. You sure as hell wouldn’t.”

  “That’s the way it was with education when the country went liberal on us.”

  “What’s liberal mean?”

  Ike sighed and then laughed. “Honey, don’t get me started on that. Let’s just say that instead of trying to get a curriculum . . .”

  She looked strangely at him.

  “That means a course of study.
”

  “Oh.”

  “A curriculum that would best educate all, regardless of color, some folks said that was unfair. Some among them—not all, certainly, but some—wanted to bastardize education. Instead of saying we are all Americans, we are going to live and work and speak in English, as set forth by men and women much more intelligent than me, we are going to call an object by its proper name, some wanted to twist and change all that. Some, again, not many, but some, wanted to bring the level of education down to their level, instead of really making an effort to climb upward. It didn’t work, Nina. One cannot regress, one cannot stand still. There is only one direction, and that is forward.”

  “You sure do talk pretty when you want to, Ike. You know that?”

  Ike laughed. “That’s the trick, honey. I can butcher the King’s English, but I have a solid base in good education. Some folks didn’t want that solid base.”

  “I sure would like to have it. Anybody that wouldn’t must be next to a fool in their thinking.”

  “That’s my opinion on the matter. And I’ll see that you get an education, Nina. I promise.”

  “How much further to the lake?”

  “We won’t make it today. We’re gonna have to take it slow and easy from now on. We’re right in the middle of Ninth Order territory.” He got to his feet and slipped on his pack, picking up his M-16 and slinging the shotgun. “Let’s head out, Nina. And remember this: Before we stick our heads around a curve in the road, we quietlike check what’s around the bend first. We’ve come too far to get caught now.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  The man lifted his eyes and surveyed the smoky scene that lay before him. Lines of fatigue creased his face. His upper body was burned to a shade of mahogany from years of working shirtless under the harsh sun. He held a bloody knife in his left hand, a. 38 revolver in his right hand. Bodies littered the yard of the old plantation home in Live Oak, Florida, that Tony Silver had called headquarters before pulling out for south Georgia.

  It had been a terrible, bloody fight between the guards and the slaves, and the slaves had spared no one in their fight for freedom. Many of the guards had women with them, and the women had fought alongside their men—and died along with them.

  Those women who had been especially cruel to the slaves, some of whom had performed acts of perversion that would have at least paralleled the atrocities committed by the legendary Bitch of Buchenwald, were dying especially hard. Their screaming echoed faintly over the dusty, bloody grounds.

  The freed slave looked toward the big house as a harsh scream ripped the air. Some of the guards’ women had enjoyed acts of sexual perversion—performed upon the men slaves. Now they were getting a taste of their own evil corruption. And they did not seem to be enjoying it.

  A freed slave came out of the great, old plantation house, zipping up his trousers and fastening his belt. He turned to a friend, “Damned bitch liked to see men being sodomized, thought I’d see how she liked it.”

  “And?” the man asked.

  “You heard her yellin’.”

  A single gunshot blasted the still air. The woman’s screaming ceased abruptly.

  The man with the gun in one hand and the bloody knife in the other turned his face from the plantation house. He didn’t blame the men for seeking vengeance, but he wanted no part of it.

  From the women’s slave quarters a hideous yowling seemed to float forever on the warm air. The male guards who had forced the women slaves into acts of perversion with both men and women—and sometimes animals—were dying hard at the hands of the freed women slaves.

  He could not and would not blame the women for seeking revenge.

  He turned at the sound of footsteps.

  “Soon all will be dead, George,” the woman said, coming to his side. “We’re free.”

  George Berger looked at the woman dressed in tattered, faded blue jean shorts and ragged T-shirt. She wore no bra, and her breasts were full and firm, the nipples jabbing at the thin fabric of the T-shirt. That she was part Indian was obvious: The thick, black hair and high cheekbones and wide, sensual mouth marked that heritage. But her eyes were an Irish green and her body was slender and stately proud. Her name was Joni. She had been captured by Silver’s men in the south of Florida and held in slavery for more than a year. She had been beaten and chained and raped and brutally sodomized, but her proud spirit had never been broken. She had been stripped naked and chained under the hot sun; she had been put in harness and forced to pull a plow like an animal; she had been humiliated in every conceivable manner, but her captors could not break her. Joni was the leader of the slave rebellion.

  “Free from the bonds of slavery, yes,” George replied. “But where the hell do we go and what the hell do we do when we get there?”

  Joni laughed, her laughter not quite covering the screaming from the men in the women’s quarters. She narrowed her eyes and glanced toward the low building. She shook her head and looked at the man. “You don’t like that, do you, George?”

  “Do you, Joni?”

  “No,” she said softly. “But nothing the women could do would compensate for what was done to them over the years.”

  “I suppose so, Joni. I repeat: What are we going to do?”

  “I keep forgetting, George, that you have been a slave for a long time. Have you ever heard of Ben Raines?”

  George smiled. Despite the years of backbreaking work and physical and mental abuse, he still wore laugh lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth. “Joni, I haven’t been a slave that long. Sure. Ben Raines. That’s the man who formed his own nation out west—back in ’89, I think it was. What about General Raines?”

  “I think we should take the people and head north. There, we can join Ben Raines and his army of Rebels. The word I get is that he’s moved his people into north Georgia and is forming another nation up there. As far as I know, General Raines is the only person attempting to bring back civilization, with schools and businesses and law and order. I think we should do that.”

  George sighed as he nodded his head in agreement. “You suppose the general would have room for an unemployed accountant?”

  Joni touched his arm, hard and muscled after more than three years of backbreaking field work. The touch was surprisingly gentle in the midst of the bloody carnage surrounding the man and woman. “If he doesn’t, George, then you and I will just have to move on. We’ve come through too much together to be separated now.”

  The man and woman standing in the middle of grotesque death, embraced and kissed.

  The screaming from the women’s slave quarters and the howling of the women from the plantation house ceased. The immediate area was strangely silent. Other men and women, all wearing tattered rags of clothing, with many still bearing the savage marks of the blacksnake whip, joined George and Joni. They were armed with everything from kitchen knives to AK-47s and M-16s.

  “It’s over, Joni,” a woman announced. “The bastards are all dead or dying.”

  “And the bitches,” a man added.

  Joni stepped from George’s embrace and faced the men and women gathered around the pair. She counted the heads. Just over sixty. They had taken fearful losses in their fight for freedom. Almost a forty percent loss.

  “All right, people,” Joni said, her voice firm and strong with the conviction of one who is right. “There are other slave farms. And there are schools—so-called—where young girls are taught the art of prostitution. There are many elderly people who are forced to cook and clean and perform household chores for Silver’s people. The old are beaten and humiliated and sometimes put to death because they are old. All those people must be freed, all of them, before we can even begin to think of our own well-being. I don’t know how many farms Silver has, or where they are all located, but we’ll find out. And we’ll help free those imprisoned there. With each success, we’ll grow stronger in number. For right now, let’s bury our dead, gather up all the weapons and bullets, and get organiz
ed. We’ve gota lot todo.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  “Great jumping balls of fire!” Emil yelled. “What in the hell was that?”

  Gunfire was ripping the mid-morning quiet of the cult. Emil ran to the picture window in the den, tripping on the hem of his robe only twice, and jerked open the drapes. He looked out at a motley crew of men, all heavily armed, and at his flock of followers, running in panic in all directions. Some of his people were lying on the ground, and they were not moving. Dark crimson stains were appearing on their robes, the blood leaking onto the ground.

  “Worst than fucking Vietnam,” Emil muttered. “Oh, shit! What am I gonna do?”

  An automatic rifle cracked, from the sound of it, Emil guessed it to be an M-16, and the window to his right erupted in a shower of broken glass and splintered wooden frames. Emil ran shrieking from the den into his bedroom. He jerked open the closet door, grabbing up his AK-47. Chambering a round, he slipped the weapon onto full automatic and ran back into the den.

  Only Emil’s guards knew anything at all about guns of any type. For Emil’s was a peaceful cult. Rather perverted in many ways, but all that was about to change. His followers smoked bunches of dope and fucked a lot, but when it came to guns, they were a bunch of schmucks. Emil remembered that word from a Jewish chick he used to ball when he sold used cars up in Chattanooga. For a few seconds, Emil wondered what had ever happened to that chick.

  Emil stuck the muzzle of the AK out the broken window and pulled the trigger. Luckily for Emil, a dozen armed men were at the front of the house just as he pulled the trigger. He emptied the clip into the knot of men, knocking most of them to the ground. Emil quickly changed clips and ran out the back door of the house. He ran out into the yard, tripped over the hem of his robe, and fell on his face. It was a very good move on his part, for a hard burst of gunfire blasted over Emil’s head.

  Emil jumped to his feet, leveled the AK, and chopped three more of the attackers to bloody bits. It was an awful sight.