“I know,” Blanton said dryly.
“What you do with those people is your problem. You and the rest of the old hanky-stomping, weepy, kissy-kissy, take-a-punk-to-lunch bunch, soft-line liberal party helped create them, so you can have them. But if they come back into the SUSA with anything on their minds other than obeying the law and working hard and respecting the rights of others, we’ll bury the bastards.
“Mr. Blanton, I’m telling you this not to chastise but to warn you that if you don’t adopt some domestic policy very similar to ours, your emerging nation is not going to make it. You see and hear all those protestors outside this office, demanding this, that, and the other thing? Why in the hell aren’t they out working on a home to live in? There are hundreds and thousand of nice homes out there that are standing empty, the owners dead—long dead. Why aren’t they gathering up firewood to burn against the cold and to cook their food? There are millions of head of cattle running loose all across this nation. They belong to no one. Why don’t they start a farm or ranch? There are millions of chickens running around loose, laying eggs everywhere. There is no reason for any of those people out there to be hungry. But they’re waiting on the government—your government—to provide the food and put it on their plates.
“There are old people out there who do need help, and they needed it before the Great War, but they didn’t get it because you and the rest of the liberal crowd were too goddamn busy providing drugs and halfway houses for junkies, free legal aid for punks, free housing for the undeserving, endless appeals for convicted murderers, pork barrel projects, free junkets . . . hell, the list is endless and depressing. There are very young people who need help, and disabled—excuse me, what is the politically correct term?—I forget—but they do need help. And you don’t need forty-seven committees to provide it.
“The rest of those people out there, Homer . . . they’re losers. They’ve been losers all their lives and they’ll die losers. They’re whiners and complainers, and we’ve kicked many of them out of the SUSA.
“I feel sorry for you, Mr. Blanton, because we’ve handed you the dregs of society. And the dregs of society—those who want something for nothing—are attracted to your form of government. We also gave you the idealistic and out-of-touch-with-reality people. They have lots of book sense but no common sense. They will fill your think tanks and write your pretty speeches and pass the legislation and implement all the glorious and totally unworkable social programs that will take your government right back to the way it was when you first took office a decade ago. And you know where that led.
“So, Mr. President, here we are. The Eagle and Dove. The nation that I helped create is going to fly. We’re going to soar. We’re already so far ahead of your nation that it’s doubtful you’ll ever catch up, not unless you start to copy our ways. And I urge you to do that.”
Ben rose from his chair and looked at Homer Blanton. Then he shook his head. “Right now, Homer, you’ll have to excuse me. I have a war to fight.”
“My war, you mean.” Blanton’s words were softly spoken.
“That’s about the size of it, Homer.” Ben walked out of the office.
Blanton’s wife broke into his thoughts. “What are you thinking, Homer? Why are you so still and silent?”
“Maybe he’s right,” Blanton muttered in tones so low no one else could hear them. “Maybe I’m wrong.”
Ben sat in the long-deserted home his team had found for him in a small village in Quebec Province and studied the maps. He couldn’t figure out what Revere was up to. Paul had pulled his people back to the west side of the Saint Lawrence River without firing a shot at the Rebels. He’d ordered all his tanks and troops back in a headlong retreat. But Ben knew that retreating was not Paul’s style. He leaned back in the old chair for a moment, his hands clasped behind his head.
Then he smiled. “Trying to pull a fast one, aren’t you, Nick, ol’ buddy.”
Ben felt sure that Revere would know by now that the three easternmost provinces had aligned with the Rebels. And Paul would also know how temperamental the French-Canadians were and how proud they were of the cities of Montreal and Quebec. They would not look with favor if Ben destroyed those cities.
But Ben knew that many of the towns and cities in Ontario Province had been hard hit; Toronto was a haven for gangs and for some of the last vestiges of the Night People. The Canadians would be most happy if Ben and the Rebels cleared out the scum from that province . . . and they wouldn’t be much concerned about how much damage he did in doing so.
“It won’t work, Nick,” Ben muttered. “I’ll starve your asses out of there and push you west and leave the cities virtually untouched.”
Ben went to bed chuckling.
“What the hell’s he waiting for?” Revere was asked a couple of days later.
Revere said nothing, just sat staring into his empty coffee cup.
“He’s moving troops around,” another senior officer said, walking to a huge wall map. “He’s blocked every bridge from Quebec all the way around to Sault Sainte Marie. There is no way we could push across the few bridges left. He’s wired them to blow. He’s massed his troops east and west and put troops up here around Sudbury and North Bay in Ontario. Why?”
“He figured it out,” Revere said softly. “I didn’t think he would, but he did. The son of a bitch!”
“Well, when the hell is he going to launch his assault against us, Paul?”
“He isn’t.”
That brought the room to total silence, all eyes staring at Nick Stafford, a.k.a. General Paul Revere.
“He’s going to starve us out of this city and push us into southern Ontario. That’s where the fight is going to take place. We’ll be running out of supplies in a few weeks. Raines has an inexhaustible supply line. Shit!”
“What are we looking at, Paul?”
“The end.”
THREE
Ben thanked Corrie for the fresh cup of coffee and busied himself carefully rolling a cigarette. Bad timing. Doctor Lamar Chase strolled into the office just as Ben was licking the paper and rolling it tight.
“Goddamn things are going to kill you, Raines,” the chief of medicine said.
“Mind your own business, Lamar. Smoking an occasional cigarette is one of the few vices I have left to me. What the hell are you doing up here?”
“You’re going to need all the medical people you can get, Raines. I sense a big push in the offing. Besides, yesterday morning I was in comm central. Revere is bugging out for Ontario and you’re letting him go.”
“So?”
Chase poured a cup of coffee from the ever-present pot and sat down. He smiled at Ben. “You’re more of a politician than you care to admit. You spared Montreal and Quebec, knowing that single act would ensure the province to come in squarely on the side of the SUSA. Toronto is in virtual ruins anyway; filled with gangs of street slime and creepies. People will applaud when you bring it down.”
Ben grunted. He swiveled his chair and thumped the wall map. “It’s not just Toronto. It’s the whole area from Windsor in the west all the way up east to Toronto. The area is stinking with street gangs and creepies. And they’ve had years to get ready for this.”
“Intelligence?”
“None. We really don’t know the strength, armament, nothing. But we know they’re ready for us. I’ve had communications monitoring everything that comes out of that area for days. It isn’t good. You taking charge of all the MASH units?”
The doctor shook his head and smiled. “Nope. That’s what officers junior to me are for . . . and they all are. I’ll just bounce around from one to the other and make sure they’re running at a hundred and ten percent.”
“Aggravating everybody and getting in the way, you mean.”
Lamar only laughed. The two men had known each other and been friends from the very beginning of the Rebel concept. If they didn’t insult each other eighty times a day, one would think the other ill.
“When do you launch the attack against Ontario?”
Ben shrugged. “There’s no hurry. I want all our people up here and ready to go. All supplies stockpiled and supply routes gone over carefully. Roads and bridges repaired. I want to leave Quebec as neat as possible.”
“Then when it’s over, you’ll send people up to clear out the rubble of Ontario and help with the rebuilding, right?”
Ben smiled.
Chase finished his coffee and stood up. He glared down at Ben. “You’re going to box Blanton in, aren’t you, Ben? You’re going to surround him. You’re not going to be satisfied until there isn’t a liberal pocket anywhere in what used to be the United States of America.”
“No, old friend, this time you’re wrong. I sure as hell want a place for one hundred percent, dyed-in-the-wool liberals. I don’t want to have to live in the same country with a whole bunch of them. Having a few around is fun; makes for very spirited arguments.”
“Hell, Raines,” Chase said, moving toward the door and as usual preparing to get in the last word. “You don’t need anyone to argue with. I’ve seen you argue with a stump!” Then he quickly left before Ben could retort.
Jersey looked up from the old magazine she was reading, her dark eyes twinkling. “Got you again, didn’t he, Chief?”
Ben grinned. “Never fails, does it, Little Bit?”
Two weeks later Ben stood on the north side of the Rideau River in Ontario Province, just east of the town of Smith’s Falls.
“I bet that was a nice little town at one time,” Cooper remarked, lowering his binoculars after viewing the ruins for a moment.
“Nothing there now,” Ben said, casing his own binoculars, just as the scouts reported back by radio.
“Town is empty,” Corrie said.
For a time Revere had his men booby-trapping towns. After the third town Ben switched his convoy north, away from 401 along the coast, up to Highway 7. Since doing that, the Rebels hadn’t encountered any booby-trapped towns, but they still entered them cautiously.
“Several hundred square miles of metropolitan Toronto,” Beth said, reading from an old travel brochure. “That probably means the punks and Revere’s people are in the suburbs and the creepies in the city. Oh, whoopie!”
Ben laughed at the expression on the face of the usually serious Beth. He patted her shoulder. “Here we go again, Beth.”
“You bet,” she replied. “I can’t tell you how much I’ve missed the smell of those filthy cannibalistic bastards.”
No one was really sure how long the Night People—creeps, as the Rebels called them—had been around. At first it was thought the germ and limited nuclear warfare had created them. But that was later proven to be incorrect. Most early theories about the destruction caused by the Great War had proved to be inaccurate. Only a few U.S. cities had been hit by nuclear strikes, the rest by germ or “clean” bombs that killed the people and left the buildings intact. The same for the rest of the world. Only a very few things about the devastation wrought by the Great War were actually known. What was a fact was that it had left the entire world in a state of anarchy that still prevailed . . . There were only about ten more-or-less-stable governments in the world. And Ben was under the impression that no one even had a remote clue how to stop it.
He was wrong.
The newly formed UN, now meeting only a few miles from the new White House, in Charleston, West Virginia, had come up with what they thought was a workable solution to the world’s problem. What they needed was a tough-assed force that could go in anywhere and put down anarchy and set up some form of government. The Security Council just hadn’t told Ben Raines or Homer Blanton—yet.
In and around Toronto, Revere and his men had struck an uneasy peace with the street gangs, warlords, and creepies. Uneasy, because the Night People and Revere and army realized they had come to the end of their rope; there was simply no place left for them to run. The street punks and slime swaggered about, supremely confident that they would defeat Ben and the Rebels. They did not take into consideration that no one had ever done that.
As the Rebels had pushed deeper into the province, the citizens began to surface. They had been staying alive by their wits alone; the weak and those who would not take up arms against their fellow man had been killed by gangs or taken and eaten by the creeps. Those that remained were the tough ones, men and women whose will to live far surpassed any man-made laws. They had managed to procure arms for themselves and killed anyone who tried to take by force what little they had. They had banded together in small communities and survived. And they had also learned, by listening to shortwave broadcasts, of the easternmost provinces throwing in with Ben Raines.
“You can count on us,” the Canadian survivors told Ben in no uncertain terms. “Goddamn a government that takes away people’s right to defend themselves and the means to do so. It will not happen again.”
Perfect candidates for the Rebels.
Ben smiled a lot as the convoy slowly headed west through Ontario Province.
“We’ll hit our first strong resistance at Peterborough,” Ben told his people. “From there on into Toronto is in enemy hands. The easy ride is over.” He turned to Corrie. “Bring the artillery up and start bringing the town down.”
When the first 155 round landed in the town, Revere, miles away in Toronto, smiled a grim soldier’s smile and felt a grudging admiration for Ben Raines. Many of Revere’s men had deserted as they realized the end was near. In tiny groups they changed into civilian clothes and slipped away rather than face the Rebels. It was a wise choice on their part. If they would find a piece of ground and plant a garden and raise a few chickens and keep their heads down and stay out of trouble, Ben would leave them alone. If they returned to a life of crime, their life expectancy was nil.
For twenty-four hours—from the north, the east, and the south—Ben’s artillery hammered the town of Peterborough. Before the first round dropped in, Ben had checked with his new Canadian friends and was assured the town held nothing but criminals and their equally worthless women. Many of the women had surrendered at Ben’s demand, bringing out their children. Those that stayed, died. The young children were immediately taken from the women and transported to MASH units to be checked over. Then they would be placed in foster homes.
“What about us?” one defiant woman made the mistake of asking Doctor Chase.
“Madame,” he told her, “these children are suffering from malnutrition, they’ve been beaten, some of them have been sexually abused, they have been neglected, many are suffering from childhood diseases that could have been prevented by simple home remedies, and they have head lice. As for you and your ilk, if you are standing in my presence one minute from right now, I will have the guards shoot you. Is that clearly understood?”
“Loud and clear, Doctor.”
“Quebec and Ontario provinces have aligned with Ben Raines,” President Blanton was informed. “Analysis believes that before it’s all over, all of Canada will join with Raines. Malcontents and whiners and the dregs of the earth are pouring across the border into the United States, demanding that we take care of them.”
“Those poor, poor people,” Homer’s wife said. “Fleeing from the injustice foisted upon them by the cruel advance of Ben Raines and his Rebels. We must take them in, Homer. It’s the Christian thing to do.”
Before Homer could give any thought to his words, he asked, “But why are they so afraid of Raines? I knew Claude LeBeau and Charles Garrison before the Great War. They’re both good decent men and very capable leaders. If they have aligned their provinces with Raines, they both see something there that we have missed.”
“What are you saying?” his wife shrieked in horror. “Ben Raines is a barbarian!”
“Horseshit!” Homer said.
His wife was so shocked by his reply that she was momentarily speechless—a condition that had not occurred since her junior high school days, when Mule Busbee took her out behind the sc
hoolhouse and showed her his dick. When she recovered her voice, for fifteen minutes afterward, the principal thought a hog had gotten loose from the Future Farmers of America workshop. He’d never heard such grunting and squealing in all his life.
“Have you taken leave of your senses?” Homer’s wife squalled, her voice on a par with Rita Rivers when she sang “God Bless America”—in Rap.
When Homer’s hearing had sufficiently recovered for him to respond, he said, “No, dear. Perhaps I’ve just found them.” The president of the United States jumped up from his chair, stalked to a window in the new Oval Office and flung it open. He stuck his head outside and shouted to the gangs of protesters below: “Go find a damn job, you goddamn lazy good-for-nothing worthless motherfuckers!”
He slammed the window down just as a thump came from behind him. He turned around. His wife had hit the floor in a dead faint.
* * *
“How many men have deserted us?” Revere asked his senior officers.
“About twenty-five percent.”
Revere tossed a pencil onto the desk and stood up. He walked around the large room for a moment, his hands behind his back. “Hell, it’s over,” he said.
“What?” his most senior officer shouted, lurching out of the chair to his boots.
“You heard me. It’s over. We’re finished. Done.” He pointed to the east. “Ben Raines won, we lost. I’m not going to stay here, aligned with cannibals and street punks and die for nothing. That’s foolish. We can’t win. Raines has us in a box, and he’s going to destroy us if we fight. I know Ben Raines. He will accept an honorable surrender, and that is exactly what I intend to do.”
“But all our equipment, our—”
Revere waved him silent. “Raines can have it as far as I’m concerned. I’m certainly not going to leave it for the cannibals and the street punks. My God, men, aren’t we a cut above them? Think about it. Gentlemen, Ben Raines won. Get it through your heads. We’re finished.”
D-Day in the Ashes Page 3