Survivor (The Ashes Book 36)

by William W. Johnstone

  After ten years, his mother was no longer able to tolerate her husband’s cruelty to Alex, and she left him. She remarried shortly thereafter, but it was too late, emotionally speaking, for Alex. He had a lot of trouble in school. He had a reputation as a class bully, and would take great pleasure in beating other children to the point of unconsciousness. Once, for example, a fight he had with another boy, thirteen, resulted in the boy having to get sixty-two stitches in his face.

  He may have murdered someone as well. Apparently one of the boys who fought got his older brother after Alex and the boy threatened to “beat Alex up.” Two days later the brother was found beaten to death, apparently with some blunt instrument like a baseball bat or piece of metal and so badly that they had to use his teeth to identify him.

  In high school, the pattern of violence continued, until he was discharged from school, but it was here, a school psychologist said, that he developed a desire to be a king, a ruler of some sort, and it was the psychologists’ interpretation, with which I concur, that these delusions of grandeur were brought about by a deep-seated feeling of insecurity and worthless-ness, the latter the message that his stepfather constantly reinforced as Alex was growing up.

  He also developed a pattern of sociopathic behavior—meaning he does not appreciate the consequences of his actions on others, nor does he care. He also uses lying, deviousness, and cleverness to serve his own ends in a way that is quite remarkable. Those who know him well say that the time to fear him the most is when he’s smiling, because when he’s smiling he always has some other agenda to follow.

  He got married fifteen years ago, but he discovered that his wife was cheating on him, and that there was a strong possibility that his two children—a little boy and girl—were not his.

  To teach her a lesson that she would never forget, he bound her very securely and also bound the children—and understand that one was three and the other four—and while his wife watched threw first one and then the other into a wood chipper while they were still very much alive. He then fed her, very slowly, into the same chipper and threw the shredded and chopped-up remains into a river.

  He received life without the possibility of parole, but one day he and three other inmates pulled a daring escape, killing four guards in the process.

  Gradually, he formed the Rejects, composed strictly of people who did not believe in God.

  It is a wonder that he can get anyone to work for him, because his violence is closely connected to his quickness to be insulted, or to his belief that someone is being disloyal to him. He holds regular conferences, and these are terrifying ordeals for the people who attend them. His brother-in-law, for example, who was his minister of health, once told him that he thought he should take a break, a week or so off, because he looked peaked. Szabo then invited his brother-in-law into the hall and shot him dead. He actually returned to the conference blowing the smoke away from the end of his pistol. Szabo’s interpretation was that his brother-in-law was plotting something against him, but there was nothing concrete to support this.

  To sum up, I would say anyone dealing with him must be extremely conscious of his paranoia and how he gets offended so easily, how prone he is to violence, and the delusions of grandeur that he has about himself. It has been said that those in the know compliment him all the time in hopes of not only currying his favor—he gives out money and property awards all the time—but to stay alive.

  Very Truly Yours,

  The name of the doctor had been blacked out.

  “Wow,” Bev said.

  Jim smiled.

  “You have a lot of chutzpah getting this,” he said, pronouncing the C as hard.

  “The C is silent,” Rosen said. “It’s pronounced hutzpah, like you’re trying to clear your throat.”

  “Well,” Jim said, “whatever way, it spells courage.”

  “I’d be interested to know what you’re thinking about when you go into these situations,” Bev said.

  “You mean UC?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Undercover.”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t think anything,” Rosen said, “I just become the person they think I am and that’s it. Doing it any other way would be very dangerous. Because if someone had a nagging suspicion about you, the whole operation could start to unravel.”

  “And you with it,” Jim said.

  “Absolutely.”

  Rosen paused, then continued.

  “You know Szabo found out about this memo and who wrote it, of course.”

  “What happened?” Bev asked.

  “He murdered the entire family, including grandparents. The method was gruesome. He tied up the doctor, his wife, and three young children, and then strangled each of them with the others watching.”

  “My God,” Bev said.

  “And as the years have gone by,” Rosen said, “he’s gotten worse.”

  “What do you mean ‘worse’?” Jim said.

  “He kills more and more people every day, and sometimes for no reason. He always seems to be looking for a reason to kill. And he’s got a quick, savage temper. I saw him shoot a guy in the head while they were standing at a urinal because he laughed where he wasn’t supposed to at something Szabo said.”

  Rosen paused.

  “They say his eyes have gotten colder the longer he’s killed. Christ, I had trouble looking into his eyes. It was like looking into the eyes of a goat, you know, flat and without any depth of human compassion.”

  Rosen took a deep breath. He was reliving some of the experiences he had as he described them.

  “But like I say, he seems to enjoy killing with his bare hands the most,” Rosen said. “He mostly lives like an animal, too.”

  “In what sense?” Jim asked.

  “He lives in a cave.”

  “In a cave?” Bev asked.

  “Absolutely Whenever he can, he tries to use natural landscapes to billet his army. It’s reminiscent of what the Vietcong used to do in North Vietnam. The ones the U.S. tunnel rats used to go after.”

  “Yeah, my brother told me about that,” Jim said.

  “What are they?” Bev asked.

  “The caves that the Vietcong lived in were accessible only by narrow tunnels. And the tunnel rats, who usually were little guys armed only with a .45 and a flashlight, would crawl through them to find them.”

  “Sounds really scary,” Bev said.

  Jim continued, “My brother told me that no one had more grit than tunnel rats. Because not only would they possibly shine their flashlight into the face of an armed Vietcong soldier, but most of the tunnels had poisonous snakes and spiders in them, as well as rats.”

  “Wow! “Bev said.

  Rosen said, “There are differences between those tunnels and caves and these. Here, you have horizontal tunnels, which are accessible by shafts that have been dug, as well as natural caves with mouths large enough to allow trucks to enter. And everything interconnects, sometimes for miles.”

  “Who dug the shafts?”

  “Slaves,” Rosen said, “people the Rejects have captured in war, such as Believers or just ordinary people from towns they conquer. And once they run out of gas they kill them.”

  “Sounds familiar,” Bev said.

  “Yeah,” Rosen said, “sounds a lot like Nazis.”

  “He sounds like a man who would want to conquer more than America,” Bev said.

  “I wouldn’t doubt it,” Rosen said, “not for a moment.”

  “You have to have an army to do all this,” Jim said.

  “He’s got about 25,000 Reject soldiers and he’s building every day.”

  “He must have trouble getting recruits based on the way the plague—” Bev said.

  “What plague?” Rosen said. “The information I have is that the plague is gone.”

  “Gone? How?”

  “I heard that it’s run its course.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, the strain
died out just as quickly as it came.”

  “Do you have any details?” Jim asked.

  “Yes,” Rosen said, “but you have to understand I got this all secondhand from a Reject, so I don’t know how accurate it is. But I think it’s true. It sounds true.”

  “Where did the plague come from?” Bev asked. “Someone said that alien space capsules were a possibility.”

  “No, the way it was explained to me,” Rosen said, “was that someone was working on what was first a medieval form of bubonic plague, which, in case you don’t know, has never really been banished from the earth, and in the course of their research, which was geared to finding a total cure for it, developed a form of it that was not receptive to antibiotics that normally were used to treat it. The scientists were all set to shut own the entire experiment—”

  “Where did this occur?” Jim asked.

  “Palo Alto, California.”

  “Okay.”

  “Anyway, before they had a chance to do it a bunch of kids broke into the lab, compromised what was a relatively unsophisticated security system, and trashed the place, something that resulted in the plague becoming un-encapsulated. And it started killing people, just like the old-fashioned plague.”

  “That’s great news,” Bev said.

  “You got that right.”

  “So I take it that all the Rejects are plague survivors, or immune to it?” Jim said.

  “Same with the Believers,” Rosen said. “Every single one of them was exposed to but survived the plague.”

  “Well, maybe the country is on the road back.”

  “Unless it returns.”

  “Twenty-five thousand soldiers,” Jim said. “That seems like an awful lot of Rejects. How does this Szabo attract them?”

  “Well, one place he goes to is prisons. A lot of people there don’t believe in God. First he would take over the prison by force, then take each and every prisoner into a room and ask them a single question.”

  “What was it?” Jim asked.

  “Do you believe in God?”

  “And . . .” Jim said.

  “If they said yes they would shoot a single bullet into their foreheads. He killed hundreds of inmates himself, and so did his underlings.” Rosen laughed. “It’s said that the percentage of people who didn’t believe in God got to be almost a hundred by the time they got to the last of them.

  “Sometimes he doesn’t kill people, though.”

  “When?” Bev asked.

  “When they’re useful.”

  “Where does he keep them?” Bev asked. “In a compound within a compound. But there’s no fence.”

  “Why not?” Jim asked.

  “It’s too dangerous to try to escape and fail. Because if he catches you—and his escape units are always successful if they go after you—the penalty is always death. But a special death.”

  “What do you mean?” Bev asked.

  “Whatever Szabo and his henchman can dream up. Most popular now is death by being impaled. They sit you on a sharp stake and you die real slow.”

  “He hung my girlfriend Ida,” Bev said.

  “Oh, really?” Rosen asked. “Why?”

  “She and I were doing missionary work.”

  “Who are his slaves?” Jim asked.

  “Different people. Anyone who is useful to his army. People who are specialists such as mechanics, gun experts, cooks, and the like. And women—all pretty, particularly teenagers. This guy and his inner circle are rapists of the first stripe.” Rosen paused. “Just imagine a philosophy where the concept of sin doesn’t exist and neither, in a sense, does evil. You can do what you want when you want with no payback at all.”

  “How well armed are they?” Jim asked.

  “Any place they go they steal the guns and whatever else. They’re getting better armed as the days go on.”

  “Do you think the Believers will stop them?” Bev asked.

  “Maybe. I was present at a number of battles with them, and in some cases they beat the Rejects. But the reverse holds true as well. The Rejects have routed the Believers.”

  “Who heads up the Believers?”

  “A guy who has some of the same background as Szabo. I understand it’s an ex-con who turned born-again Christian. His name is McAulliffe. They call him Father McAulliffe. He spent fifteen years in San Quentin for manslaughter but when he was released he was a changed man. And after things went to hell in the world he started the Believers. His contention is that God is the only way to go.”

  “I don’t disagree,” Jim said, “but my sense is that the Believers are fanatics.”

  “It would seem that way,” Rosen said. “But I have no way to confirm it.”

  Jim poured what was left of the coffee for all of them, then said to Rosen, “How did you get the idea that the Rejects might find out who you are?”

  Rosen’s face colored slightly, something that Jim noticed.

  “I don’t know. It was just a sense of it. Call it a reporter’s instincts.”

  Jim sipped his coffee and glanced gently at Rosen.

  “Why did the question upset you?”

  “What question?”

  “That the Rejects might find out who you are.”

  “I’m not upset.” Jim nodded.

  “I think we should get on the road,” he said.

  “Can I go with you?” Rosen asked.

  “Yeah,” Jim said, “sure.”

  “Good,” Rosen said, smiling.

  They loaded the gear, with Rosen helping Jim and Bev. At one point Jim and Bev were alone.

  “I don’t believe him,” Jim said, “about not being upset. But I can’t figure out why.”

  “I agree,” Bev said. “His cheeks became mottled when you asked him that question.”

  “I know one thing,” Jim said, “my brother Ray never liked the press. Didn’t trust them. He had a lot of problems with them when he served in Iraq displacing Saddam Hussein.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “At first he admired the press, particularly the guys who—as he put it—had the ‘stones’ to become embedded in active combat units.”

  “You mean ride along with them?”

  “Exactly,” Jim said, “but he said that the same guys who played buddy with the troops eventually turned against the GIs and wrote stories that were dramatic and upsetting. They used to report that these things were much worse than they were, not report on how things were getting better, and complain about the GIs morale. The morale of the troops in Iraq was fine, Ray said, it was just the usual moaning. And I remember him saying that if a GI isn’t moaning ‘there’s something desperately wrong with his morale. A happy soldier is one who is talking and beefing. An unhappy one is silent.’”

  “Their reporting was horrible. They get facts and figures wrong because they never take the time to investigate, to find out the truth of something. My brother told me once that some guy on NBC said something like sixty guys had been killed in combat over a two-month period. What he did not say—because he did not know—was that there were actually only twenty-one killed by Iraqi firepower, while twenty-nine were killed in accidents or other causes, including two guys who died swimming in the Tigris River.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “The thing that used to get him, also, was the stupidity of the newspeople. Most of the people really appreciated having America there, but there are certain anti-American groups that would just wait until the TV people showed up and then run out hollering and screaming about how bad things were in Iraq. So this meant that this baloney would show up on the nightly news the next night. It didn’t matter that it was untrue. What mattered was that it would play well on TV. Ray used to complain about this all the time.”

  “I only had one experience with them,” Bev said, “when our church was burglarized once. Three different papers had three different sets of ‘facts.’”

  “Yes,” Jim said, “reporters are different from ordinary people. And I
read once too, though I don’t know if this affects their ability to do their work, is that many of them suffer from posttraumatic stress syndrome, the kind of condition that GIs in the Vietnam War had.”

  “Why?”

  “Because like soldiers they just see too much. It overloads their ability to absorb it all emotionally. I mean think about it. Bad news is always good news for a reporter, so he or she is always covering fires, murders, all kinds of things that people experiencing such things find upsetting close up.”

  Bev nodded.

  A few minutes later the HumVee was tooling north once again. Into what, no one really knew.

  ELEVEN

  Alex Szabo was, to put it mildly, an impressive-looking person. He was six feet six inches tall, had a shaved, polished head, flat, broken features, was muscular in the extreme but with an astonishing thirty-two-inch waist. Some of his soldiers called him V. Standing directly in front of you, he did, indeed, look like the letter V.

  While his body was impressive, no doubt the scariest thing about him, as Morty Rosen had said, were his eyes, which were light blue but flat, without the depth of human compassion or feeling for others. If what Dante once said, that “the eyes are the windows of the soul,” was true, then in Szabo’s case the windows looked in on hell.

  As Rosen had also told Jim and Bev, the premier enjoyed killing in general but doing it with his bare hands in particular. He had lost count, but he had strangled or beaten to death with his bare hands over four hundred people, including men, women, and children. He usually killed because they believed in God, but he had also done it because of infractions of his rules or refusing a direct order. There was no trial to weigh the circumstances of an event. Decisions were made instantly—and carried out virtually instantly.

  And the infraction could be quite minor. Once, for example, one of his soldiers had neglected to clean up his area as instructed. Without further ado, Szabo, wearing a rubber apron because he had an idea how the man’s bowels would react, had come up behind him while he stood in formation, clamped a forearm over the miscreant’s windpipe, and strangled him until he lost control of his sphincter muscles, emptying his bowels as he died.