Escape from the Ashes

by William W. Johnstone

  “Hello! Hello! Is anyone here? Hello!”*

  *Trapped in the Ashes

  “Hello!”

  Ben woke himself up by speaking the word aloud. For a moment, he was as confused by where he was as he was confused by the dream he had just experienced. Then he remembered that he was in a cave in the north woods, the survivor of an airplane crash.

  The fire had burned down during the night, but enough glowing coals remained to renew the fire. Tossing in a handful of wood, Ben got down on his stomach and blew on the coals to awaken them. Finally, they caught and, as fingers of fire began curling up around the firewood, Ben sat back up and began looking around. The flickering flames painted the walls of the cave a wavering orange. The shadows they cast were long and indecipherable.

  What was also indecipherable was the meaning of the strange dream he just had. Was he the person in the dream? Or was he dreaming about someone else? He still had no idea who he was, or why he was here. And he didn’t know the name of the location of his dream, where it was, if it was real, or if it was just a part of his subconscious imagination.

  Ben didn’t know why he knew, but he was certain that what he had just experienced was more memory than dream. At some time in his past he had entered a town exactly like the one in his dream, a town of death and destruction. But where was that town? And when had it happened? If that memory returned, then perhaps the rest of his memory would come back as well. It might come back in snatches, as this one just did, but if so, so be it. If he could cobble together enough snatches of memory, perhaps he could reconstruct enough of his life to bring it all to him.

  “Who am I?” Ben shouted into the cave, and the last two words came echoing back: “. . . am I? . . . am I? . . . am I?”

  “And what the hell am I doing here?” he shouted. Then the words came back: “. . . doing here? . . . doing here? . . . doing here?”

  After a breakfast of roasted bear meat, Ben took the bear’s stomach down to the river, where he cleaned it thoroughly, then he filled it with water, checking the seals he had made that would allow the stomach to retain liquid. By midmorning, wearing his bear robe and carrying his food, water, and supplies, Ben checked the compass, then started out. Allowing for compass deviation, he began following an azimuth of 250 degrees.

  As Ben got under way, he thought about how easily the survival skills came to him. It was more than mere intuition. Whatever and whoever he was, he realized that he was a most resourceful person.

  “Ben,” he said to himself, “I don’t know who the hell you are, but if I’m going to be stranded here in the wilderness, I’m damn glad I’ve got you with me. Now, that’s not being conceited if I don’t even know who I am, is it?” he asked, laughing at his attempt to make light of the situation.

  Control Group Headquarters, Alberta

  Cletus Doyle stood on the front porch of the former Tredway House, looking out over the group of Control Group soldiers who were assembled to begin the hunt for Ben Raines. Cain and Burkett were on the porch as well.

  “Where is Colonel Lynch?” Doyle asked.

  “She hasn’t come down yet,” Cain said. “We may as well start without her.”

  “Here she comes,” Burkett said.

  Tamara came out of the front door and stood there for a moment, looking out over those who were gathered for the assembly. Burkett saw her exchange an intimate glance with the redhead who had spent the night with her.

  “So, how was your night?” Burkett asked. He was still bugged by the fact that the redhead had gone with Tamara rather than with him.

  “Would you like a blow-by-blow report?” Tamara asked. She smiled smugly. “Or rather, should I say a ‘lick-by-lick’ account?”

  “You are a bitch, Tamara,” Burkett said.

  “And proud of it,” Tamara replied.

  With all four colonels in place, Doyle began his remarks.

  “Remember,” Doyle said as he addressed the assembled soldiers of Die Kontrollgruppe. “Ben Raines is unarmed, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t dangerous. He is a very resourceful man.”

  “But he doesn’t have a weapon, right?” Pete Logan asked.

  “No, he has no weapon,” Doyle replied.

  Logan grinned. “Then how dangerous can the son of a bitch be?”

  “He can be very dangerous,” Tamara said, stepping up to the front of the porch then. “And don’t you forget that.”

  “And there’s a fifty-thousand-dollar reward to bring him back?” John Purvis asked.

  “That’s right, fifty thousand dollars,” Doyle answered.

  “And that’s dead or alive,” Cain added.

  “Damn, he’s unarmed and we get fifty thousand dollars for bringing him in, dead or alive,” Logan said. “The way I look at it, this is going to be like taking candy from a baby.”

  “If you say so,” Doyle said.

  “How do you want us to do this, Colonel?” one of the other soldiers asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Should we go out in a group, or separate and go out on our own? What?”

  “I don’t care how you do it,” Doyle said. “As far as I’m concerned, you can work it out among yourselves. All I am interested in is results.”

  “Fifty thousand dollars? Hell, I don’t plan on sharing that with anyone,” one of the men said. “The way I figure it, it is every man for himself.”

  “Yahoo!” another shouted, and the group scattered as everyone started on the hunt.

  “Hey, Purvis,” Logan called as the others began scattering. “What do you say we go together?”

  “Why would I want give up half the reward?” Purvis replied.

  “Think about it,” Logan said. “If we go together, our chances of finding him go up by one hundred percent. Sure, we’ll only get twenty-five thousand each, but the odds of the two of us getting twenty-five thousand are twice as good as the odds of one of us getting fifty thousand.”

  Purvis scratched his cheek as he thought about Logan’s logic. “All right,” he finally said. “Sounds good to me. Where do we start?”

  “We start by looking at the map,” Logan said.

  “What’s that going to tell us?”

  “Look, you have to figure that he’s going to try and make it back to Port Hardy. If we look at the map, we’ll be able to see the most logical way for him to go. While everyone else is running around in the woods like chickens with their heads cut off, we’ll find a place to wait for him.”

  “Yeah,” Purvis agreed, smiling broadly. “Yeah, sounds like a good idea.”

  Studying the map, they saw that Ben would have to go through Sunwapta Pass in order to negotiate the mountains. Logan put his finger on the map.

  “That’s where we need to go,” he said.

  “That’s a long walk from here.”

  “We can go more than halfway on the all-terrain vehicles,” Logan said. “We’ll have to walk the rest of the way, but that will put us ahead of him.”

  “All right, let’s do it,” Purvis agreed.

  It looked as if Logan’s hunch was about to pay off, because about one hour after abandoning their ATVs he and Purvis spotted their quarry.

  “There he is,” Logan said, pointing him out.

  “Are you sure that’s him?” Purvis asked.

  “Yeah, I’m sure,” Logan replied. “At first, I thought it was a bear, but when I saw him the second time, I saw that it was a man wearing a bearskin.”

  “Where the hell did he come up with a bearskin?” Purvis asked. “I thought Doyle, Crane, and Burkett said they didn’t leave him any survival gear.”

  “Maybe he killed a bear,” Logan suggested.

  “How? With his bare hands? They didn’t leave him any weapons either.”

  “As far as I’m concerned, it makes no difference how he got it. The point is, he’s worth fifty thousand dollars to us, dead or alive.”

  “Yeah, well, you can just forget about that ‘alive’ shit. There’s no way I’m goin
g to try and bring that son of a bitch in alive,” Purvis said.

  Logan chuckled. “I don’t know. It might be kind of fun to bring him in, then listen to him beg for his life before we kill him.”

  “Yeah, but I’ll get just as much enjoyment out of seeing the expression on his face when he gets to Sunwapta Pass and sees that we beat him there,” Purvis said. “The way I figure it, Mr. Raines is going to be one surprised dude.

  “Yeah, but not for long,” Logan said. “I figure that by the time he figures what’s going on, we’ll be dropping the hammer on his ass.”

  “Boom!” Purvis said, laughing.

  TWELVE

  What neither Logan nor Purvis realized was that Ben would not be surprised by their sudden appearance, because he had already seen them. He’d also seen, from the black uniforms they were wearing, that if not the same men who had jumped him yesterday, they were obviously affiliated with those men in some way. He was certain that they were looking for him.

  From his perusal of the chart, Ben knew that if these men had seen him, and were planning to attack him, Sunwapta Pass would be the ideal site for the ambush. Deciding that forewarned was forearmed, he continued along his current path, giving no sense of having seen his pursuers.

  It was Ben’s intention to lull the two men into a false sense of security. In order to accomplish that, he neither quickened nor slowed his pace, but continued on without looking around, as if everything were normal. Then, when he was out of sight, he left the path and started climbing up the side of the hill adjacent to the trail he had been following.

  It was a hard climb until he found a ledge that would allow him to continue laterally, but even with the ledge, the going was extremely difficult. Despite the difficulty, Ben was able to continue his progress until he was well beyond the entrance to the mouth of the pass. Once there, he worked his way down to the trail. That maneuver put him behind where the two men would be waiting for him with guns raised and ready.

  Satisfied that he had avoided an immediate confrontation, Ben turned and continued on his way, moving quietly so as not to alert them. He would have avoided them entirely, getting away cleanly, if Logan hadn’t turned just before Ben disappeared around the bend.

  Logan saw him.

  “What the hell!” Logan shouted, pointing toward Ben. “How did that son of a bitch get by without us seeing him?”

  Logan and Purvis opened fire, but the range was too long, and Ben had no trouble disappearing into the forest, even as bullets were whipping by.

  “Get him!” Logan shouted.

  Ben ran fast enough to open up some distance between him and his pursuers. Then, when he was certain that he had enough time to set it up, he laid a strand of the smaller cable just about ankle-high across the path. About half a man’s length beyond the cable, he used his sword to cut a sharpened stake, which he planted point-up. Next, he kicked leaves over the cable strand and the stake.

  The whole thing took less than a minute, and even as he was kicking the leaves over the strand, he heard the two men approaching. He got behind a tree just as they came up.

  “Where is he?” Purvis asked. “Where’d the son of a bitch go?”

  “He can’t be far,” Logan answered. “Probably just around . . . uh!”

  Logan tripped over the cable, then pitched forward.

  “Ha! You dumb ass! You tripped!” Purvis said.

  Logan made a gurgling sound.

  “Get up,” Purvis said. “The son of a bitch is getting away from us.”

  When Logan still didn’t get up, Purvis knelt beside him, grabbed his shoulder, and turned him over.

  “Oh, shit!” he shouted, recoiling in horror. A large, gaping hole was in Logan’s chest, and his shirtfront was covered with blood. There was also blood on a sharpened stake that was sticking up from the pile of bloody leaves. Logan’s eyes were open, but unseeing. “Logan!” Purvis shouted. “Logan!”

  Purvis stood up then and continued to stare down at Logan’s body, totally confused as to what happened.

  “You dumb shit!” he said. “You’re so clumsy you stumbled over a tree root!”

  Purvis looked back to see what had tripped him. That was when he saw the cable stretched across the path. For just a moment, seeing the cable confused him even more, as he wondered what it was and what it was doing there. Then he realized that it was no accident.

  “Holy shit!” he said. “Somebody put that there.”

  “Not just somebody,” Ben said, stepping out from behind the tree. “I put it there.”

  “You son of a bitch!” Purvis shouted. He tried, desperately, to bring his Uzi up to bear on Ben, but before he could do so, Ben thrust forward with his sword. The wide blade with the jagged edge plunged deep into Purvis’s chest.

  Ben withdrew his sword from Purvis’s body, then held it before him, the blade running red with blood.

  “Uhn!” Purvis grunted. Reaching down, he covered his wound with both hands, but was unable to stop the bleeding. The blood filled the palms of his hands, then spilled through his fingers. He looked up at Ben, his face a picture of pain and surprise.

  “Who are you?” Ben asked.

  Purvis didn’t answer.

  “Who am I?”

  “You . . . you don’t know who you are?”

  Ben shook his head. “The plane crash. It’s taken my memory. Who am I, and why were you trying to kill me?”

  Despite it all, Purvis laughed. The laughter pulled and strained at his wound, causing him even more pain.

  “I don’t aim to tell you anything, you bastard,” Purvis said. He laughed again. “It’s almost worth dying, just to see you so fucked up.”

  Purvis coughed, and blood started streaming from his mouth. He gagged, then pitched forward, falling alongside Logan.

  Ben stood over the bodies of the two men he had just killed. He had the feeling that he had killed before, but he couldn’t remember it He looked at the sword he had made from the wreckage of the airplane. With it he had killed a bear and defended himself against assassins. It had served him well, but he wouldn’t be needing it anymore. He tossed the sword aside and picked up one of the Uzis, plus all the ammunition and magazines both men were carrying. One of them was also wearing a large bowie knife. Ben took that as well.

  Control Group Headquarters, Alberta

  “Well, that answers the question,” Tamara Lynch said as some of the others brought Logan and Purvis’s bodies back to the hotel.

  “What question is that?” Doyle asked.

  “Whether or not Ben Raines is still alive. He obviously is, which means you three dumb shits fucked up.”

  “Yeah, well, at least we know he isn’t armed,” Cain said.

  “Oh? And how do we know that?” Tamara asked.

  “Well, look at ’em,” Cain said, pointing to the two bodies. “They ain’t shot. Don’t you think, if he was armed, they would’a been shot?”

  “Uh-huh,” Tamara replied. “Tell me something, Cain. Where are their guns?”

  “What?”

  “Purvis and Logan were both carrying Uzis, weren’t they? I mean, you don’t think they went after Raines with their bare hands, do you?”

  “Well, no, I wouldn’t think so.”

  “Where are their guns now?”

  “Oh,” Cain said. “Oh, yeah, I see what you mean. Raines probably got them.”

  “Probably,” Tamara said. “Of course, from the way he handled these two, it doesn’t seem to make any difference whether he was armed or not.”

  “Logan and Purvis were good men,” Burkett said. “I can’t believe Raines could take them out, them being armed and him not, unless he got the jump on them.”

  “Of course he got the jump on them, you dumb son of a bitch!” Tamara said. “That’s how you beat your enemy. I’d give anything to have three or four real men like Ben Raines with us.”

  “What would a bull dyke like you do with a real man?” Doyle asked with a sneer.

  “I do
n’t know,” Tamara answered. “I haven’t seen any real men lately.”

  Cain laughed. “Ha! I guess she told you off,” he said.

  “You think he is the only one I was talking about?” Tamara asked.

  Now it was Doyle’s time to laugh.

  “I’m glad you boys are enjoying yourselves,” Tamara said. “In the meantime, Ben Raines is still wandering around the north woods, alive and dangerous.”

  “He’s in the middle of the north woods with no survival gear, three hundred miles from civilization. Just how long do you think he can last?” Burkett asked.

  “I think he can last until we take him out,” Tamara said.

  “Yeah, well, we’ve got about two hundred well-armed people looking for him. Mark my word, we’ll have him within the next twelve hours.”

  “Is that a fact. Are you willing to make that promise to the Gruppe Kommandant?” Tamara asked.

  “What do you mean, am I ready to make a personal guarantee to the GK?” Burkett asked. He shook his head. “Hell, no, I ain’t goin’ to do that. Ain’t no way I’m going out on a limb by myself.”

  “Then your word that we will have him within twelve hours means nothing,” Tamara reminded him.

  “You know what I think?” Cain said. “I think we might have to get off our ass and go find him ourselves.”

  “I think you might be right,” Tamara said. “What do you think, Doyle?”

  “What do I think?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Have any of you ever been to a bullfight?” Doyle asked.

  “A bullfight? No,” Cain replied.

  “In a bullfight, they send the banderilleros out to stick banderillas into the bull.”

  “Banderillas?”

  “Yeah, you know, those decorated barbed sticks you see hanging from the bull? They do that to weaken the animal before the matador comes out to finish him off.”

  Cain and Burkett looked at each other in confusion. “Christ, Doyle, have you lost your mind?” Cain asked. “We’re talking about going after Ben Raines, and you are telling us some dumb-assed fact about bullfighting.”