“Living does seem much more precious to me now,” a battalion commander said. “But the thought of facing a firing squad does not appeal to me.”
“Nor to me,” the others in the room echoed.
“We’ll face no firing squad,” Revere said. “I’ve known Raines for thirty years. He has something that we don’t. Or that we’ve managed to hide very well.”
“And that is?”
“Honor.”
FOUR
Ben looked up as two of his forward recon people walked in, a man between them.
“Says he’s from General Revere, sir. Has an urgent message for you.”
“Cut his bonds and get him some coffee,” Ben said. “Have you eaten?” he asked the prisoner.
“Not since yesterday, sir. Our own rations are a bit thin in the city. And we haven’t developed a taste for human flesh.” He shuddered, then accepted the cup of coffee with thanks. A plate of food was placed in front of him, and Ben could tell the man was hungry. “But the gangs have plenty of food,” he added.
“Eat and then tell me what’s on your mind,” Ben told him.
“I can do that while eating, General. Paul wants to pack it in. An honorable surrender. But he doesn’t want the punks or those goddamn cannibals to get our equipment to use against you.” He dug in his shirt pocket and handed Ben a sealed envelope. “From Paul, sir.”
Ben put on his reading glasses and before reading glanced at the young officer. He caught a quick smile on the man’s lips.
The messenger said, “Paul wears them, too, sir. But he doesn’t think we know it.”
Ben read the short note and grunted. “Are you expected to return?”
“No, sir.”
Ben handed the note to Corrie. “One short word on that frequency, Corrie. At 1800 this evening.”
“Yes, sir.” She hesitated for a moment. “You think he’s on the level, sir?”
“Oh, yes. Paul may be many things that we don’t approve of, but he is a realist. He’ll surrender.”
“Are you going to inform Blanton, Ben?” Chase asked later that day, just a few moments before the surrender was to take place.
“No. We’ll keep all his surrendered equipment and spread it around to our new allies.”
“You really don’t trust Blanton, do you?”
“Not yet, Lamar. I think basically he’s a decent fellow. But until he gets some of that liberal pie in the sky knocked out of him, no, I won’t trust him.”
“Then you haven’t heard?”
“Haven’t heard what?”
Chase chuckled. “The president of the United States leaned out of a window in the Oval Office and gave a group of demonstrators outside a good cussing.”
Ben’s eyes widened. “Homer Blanton did that?”
“Yes. A few days ago, so the scuttlebutt goes.”
“Maybe there’s hope for him after all.”
Cooper came into the office. “Scouts report Revere and troops leaving the suburbs, General.”
Ben pushed back his chair and stood up. Lamar said, “He’s sure to have wounded who need assistance. I’ll get busy.”
A few moments later, Corrie, who was monitoring transmissions, said, “He’s clear of the city and ordering his men to unload their weapons.”
Ben nodded and glanced at Jersey. “Relax, Little Bit. They won’t try anything. They know we’ve got every gun trained on them. One screwup and they’re all dead meat.”
“Right,” Jersey said, with about as much enthusiasm as a person digging at an ingrown toenail.
Nick Stafford, a.k.a. Paul Revere, was the first one to step out of a Jeep and walk toward Ben, his hands held slightly up in the air and out from his body. He wore a sidearm. “What do you want me to do with this pistol, Ben?” he called. “It’s not loaded.”
“Keep it,” Ben told him. “You’ll need to be armed because of all the roaming gangs still in the area. Come on in the house.”
Seated in front of Ben’s desk, Nick said, “It’ll be after midnight before all my people get clear of the city. And they’ll be shooting as those damn cannibals and the street punks try to stop us.”
“I expected that.” Ben poured them both coffee. “You hungry, Nick?”
“I could eat. But I’d like for my men to be fed first.”
“They will be. What now, Nick?”
“That’s rather up to you, isn’t it, Ben?”
“Why did you surrender?”
Nick smiled. “I finally realized the futility in fighting you. And quite frankly I don’t care much about dying.”
Ben was thoughtful for a moment. “Nick? You want to join my Rebels?”
Nick was so startled he almost spilled his coffee. He stared at Ben for a moment. “Are you fucking serious?”
“Yes. A lot of your men are nothing but killers and psychos. But I would imagine there are lots of good men scattered among your ranks.”
“Oh, sure. I have all their personnel files. Your people can go over them; weed out the bad ones. You really mean this, don’t you?”
“Yep. Hell, Nick, Striganov and I were once bitter enemies. West fought against me for a time; now he’s engaged to marry my daughter. What about it? You want in?”
Nick smiled. “Fighting is what I do best, Ben. I’ve been a soldier since I was sixteen years old. Count me in.”
Ben’s smile was cold. “Warn your people that the psychological testing to get into this army is rough. And you won’t be exempt from it, Nick.”
“I wouldn’t expect to be. When does it start?”
“Tomorrow morning.”
At the end of the week, about 60 percent of Nick’s army had been tested and rejected. At the end of the second week, the Rebel doctors and shrinks had five full battalions of Nick’s men tested and ready to assimilate into the Rebel ranks. Ben personally went over the records of the men Nick wanted to serve with him in his own battalion, which would be 21 Batt, and okayed all of them. To a man, all the former mercenaries now in the Rebel ranks said they never wanted to go through that mind-probing experience again.
As was Rebel custom, Nick and his men were welcomed warmly once the testing was over. Ben called for a meeting of all batt coms.
Nick took one look at Ben’s son, Buddy, and shook his head. “Looks like Rambo,” he whispered to Ben.
Ben smiled and whispered, “I made the mistake of telling him that once. Now he has all the movies and watches them in his free time. I think I created a monster.”
Laughing, Nick took his place among the batt coms and waited for Ben to start the meeting. Ben pointed to a blowup of the area controlled by the creeps and the street gangs. “This is going to be another L.A., people, albeit on a smaller scale. But it’s going to be a rough one. Nick has confirmed that the punks and creeps have a large force, they’re well armed, dug in deep, and ready for a fight. This is their last large bastion in North America, so they’ll be defending it with all they’ve got, right down to the last man. You are all well aware of the fact that Night People don’t surrender. Nick, what you may not know is that we have never been able to rehabilitate a creepie child. God knows, we tried. At first.”
“What the hell do you do with them, Ben?” Nick asked.
Ben just stared at him for a moment.
“Shit!” Nick said. “I’ve done a lot of things in my life that I’m ashamed of, but I never went in for that, Ben. Not even in ’Nam; you know that.”
“If we had the time, Stafford,” Lamar Chase said from the back of the room, “I’d take you down to what we used to call Base Camp One and show you the kids—who are now adults—that we tried to rehab. They’re monsters. They’ll attack anybody if given the slightest opportunity. They will spend the rest of their unnatural lives locked in specially built cells. We no longer take creepie prisoners . . . unless they are tiny babies. We’ve had some success with them. But nothing is guaranteed, even with them.”
Nick had twisted in his chair to look at the chief of m
edicine. “Is it in the genes?”
“We don’t know,” Lamar admitted. “What we do know is that they’ve been around for many, many years. Decades before the Great War. And the consensus is we’ll never completely wipe them out.”
“All right, people,” Ben called. “Here it is. Ike, you take your battalion, along with Tina, O’Shea, Malone, and Gomez, and take the westernmost sectors. You’ll take Windsor, then turn and work east. Georgi, you take Dan, Rebet, Danjou, and Greenwalt and drive down from the north. I’ll take Buck, West, Nick, and Jim and hit them from the east. Everybody else will stay in reserve. When everyone is in position, let me know. That’s it.”
Nick eased up to Ben as the others were filing out. He grinned and said, “You keeping an eye on me, Ben?”
Ben returned the smile. “Not really, Nick ol’ buddy. You see, you and your boys are spearheading the push west into the suburbs.”
Ben walked away chuckling, leaving Nick with his mouth hanging open.
Ben massed his troops north and south along Highway 7/12, with two battalions of reserves running east to west along Highway 48. Georgi was strung out west to east along Highway 9, with a small force of tanks and ground troops making a turn at Arthur and heading south down to just north of Waterloo. Ike had the hot spot, for when the creeps and the punks started running from Toronto, they would have only one direction to run, straight toward Ike and his people in the west. But Ben was betting they wouldn’t do that.
At 0600 Ben glanced at Corrie. “Start the shelling of Windsor, Corrie.”
From across the river in the rubble of Detroit, Rebel 155’s opened up with a mixed bag of rounds and started the job of leveling Windsor, Canada.
“All units push off,” Ben said.
“All units on the move,” Corrie replied a moment later.
Lamar Chase appeared at Ben’s side. “Not going in with the first wave, Ben?”
“No. I’ll leave that to Nick and the other batt coms.”
“Finally getting smart,” the old doctor said. Ben smiled.
In the littered, trashed, and filth-strewn city of Toronto and the suburbs, the warlords and gang leaders and creepies knew their time had finally come. They had names like Fast Eddie and Technicolor Joe and I. B. Kool and the North York Ramblers and the East York Dudes. Pure punk shit any direction one wished to look.
And well-armed punk shit, for when the world went into chaos, the punks broke into armories and police stations and army depots and stole the best of weapons. But they were not well trained and had no real discipline.
North, west, and south of the city, the land had been raped by the punks and the creepies in a never-ending search for food. It was void of people, thanks to the creeps, and trashed and looted thanks to the street slime. Georgi and Ike had reported to Ben that they never expected such devastation and lack of human habitation. From Owen Sound down to Waterloo, and from Parkhill east to Kitchener, the Rebels had encountered very few people. Most of those had run away when they saw the Rebels.
“Can’t blame them,” Ben said. “They don’t know who the hell we are.” He smiled. “Let’s get a bit closer, gang.”
Cooper hid his smile and stepped on the pedal. He had been Ben’s driver for too long not to know that Ben Raines wanted to be right in the middle of the action. Cooper glanced in the rearview. Ben’s personal company of Rebels, including several MBTs, were right behind him.
“Take the next road to the south, Coop,” Ben said, after he consulted a map.
“That’s taking us away from the main force,” Cooper reminded him.
“Yeah, I know. Turn here. We might get lucky and run into a few surprises.”
Ben’s way of saying they might see some action—soon.
Cooper slowed when he spotted a half dozen running figures darting across the road in a small village about a quarter mile ahead.
“Company, General.”
“Yeah, I see them. Get closer.”
“Used to be about four hundred people living in this town,” Beth said.
“Colonel West is rattling the air,” Corrie said. “Demanding to know where we are.”
“Tell him we’re fine. I’m just taking a shortcut.”
“He says that is totally unacceptable.”
“Tell him he’s breaking up and we’ll try to reestablish contact in a few minutes.”
Corrie did. “He says that’s bullshit.”
Cooper spun the wheel hard just in time to avoid getting the windshield pocked by heavy machine-gun fire. He roared in between two old buildings.
“Tell the company to dismount and spread out, west to east,” Ben said, stepping out of the Hummer. “Slow advance toward our position.”
Since ammunition had proven hard to come by for his Desert Eagle 50, Ben had once more returned to his Colt government model .45 autoloaders. He picked up his Thompson and walked to the edge of the building, stealing a quick peek around the corner. He ducked back to his team and said, “Whole bunch of punks massing on both sides of the street, gang. All the way to the other end of town. I think we’re outnumbered.”
“Why does that not come as any surprise to me?” Corrie said.
Jersey smiled. “Kick-ass time!”
FIVE
The punk leader of this particularly odious pack of slime called himself Mahmud the Terrible. His name was accurate to some degree, since his body odor had been known to overwhelm even the most serious of nasal blockages.
“I comes from a long line of desert warriors,” Mahmud was fond of saying. Supposedly that explained his aversion to bathing. “I can trace my ancestors back to Gandhi. I am the Lion of the Desert.” One could only assume he meant Haile Selassie, but what the hell? What’s a continent or two when nobility is involved? Anybody can make a geographic mistake.
Mahmud was also fond of saying that he was bulletproof. He was about fifteen minutes away from having to prove that.
Mahmud stuck his head around the corner of what used to be a Mom and Pop grocery store. He was wearing a real nifty hat made of fake tiger skin. Said the hat had been in his family for centuries and had once been worn by Lawrence of Somalia. Geographically, he was getting closer.
Ben gave him a short burst from his old Chicago Piano, the .45-caliber slugs knocking bits of brick off the wall and peppering the face of the Lion of Jackson, Mississippi, son of a hard-working police officer who (after forty-seven arrests) finally gave up on his son and booted him out of the house at seventeen and told him to hit the road and don’t come back. Mahmud knew better than to mess around with his daddy, for his daddy was one mean law-and-order cop. Mahmud barely made it to Canada before the world blew up.
Mahmud, the Lion of the Desert, if he didn’t smarten up, was only moments away from meeting the biggest cat on the block.
“Hey, asshole!” Ben yelled. “You with the stupid-looking hat. You hear me?”
Two short blocks away, Mahmud frowned.
“I think he talkin’ to you, Mahmud,” one of the Lion’s men said.
“Yeah, I think he just insulted your hat,” another of the Lion’s men said. “You gonna let him get away wit’ that?”
“You leave my hat out of this!” Mahmud hollered. Again he frowned, as the sounds of a tank clanking into position reached him. “Ummm, shit!” Mahmud said. He and his men had the opportunity, years back, to steal several tanks that had been abandoned. Trouble was, the modern tank had so many computers in them, none of the Lion’s kitties could figure out how to drive the goddamn thing. One of his men had flipped a switch or pulled a lever or done some damn thing and the turret swung around, the barrel of the 105-mm main gun knocking the Lion to the ground, sprawling ass over elbows. That was the last time any of them ever fooled around with a tank. Too complicated, man.
The tank that was clanking into position for a shot was a M60A3, with a 105-mm main gun. Mahmud peeked around the corner of the building just as 105 was lowering.
“Hit the trail!” Mahmud hollered, and
took off at a lope just as the 105 belched fire and smoke and one side of the old building blew apart.
“Shhiittt!” Mahmud’s second in command, Abdul, squalled as bricks rained down on him.
The sounds of car and truck engines roaring laboriously away drifted to Ben and his people. Rebels worked their way up the street to check it out. Ben leaned up against the Hummer and rolled a cigarette.
“Sorry-assed firefight,” he bitched.
“It’ll get better,” Jersey said. “I got a hunch this bunch was way off their turf—just checking things out.”
“West wants to know where in the blankety-blank, blankety-blank, blankety-blank hell we are,” Corrie said.
“Tell him we’re all right,” Ben said. “Mount up, everybody. Let’s stay on this old road until we reach the expressway and take that on in. I think things will begin to pick up very shortly.”
They certainly did pick up, just about three miles farther down the road.
“Pull over and duck in between those old buildings over there, Coop,” Ben said, pointing. “That intersection up there just looks too clean to suit me.”
Corrie was busy telling the company of Rebels and armor behind them what was happening. When she finished, Ben said, “Get me Nick on scramble, Corrie.”
“Nick, I’m not far from the expressway on Lake Ontario. I don’t even know what road this is. What can you tell me about it?”
“What the hell are you doing down there, Ben?” Nick came back. “From Pickering on in is strong creepie country. Get the hell out of there!”
“He’s beginning to sound like all the rest of the batt coms,” Copper remarked.
“Yeah,” Ben said with a grin. “I do believe Nick has finally found a home.” He keyed the mic. “Negative on pull-back, Nick. We’re too far in for that. How is your advance?”
“Slow, Ben. The punks and the creeps smartened up and are giving everybody one hell of a fight. I just got off the blower with Georgi. He’s stopped cold for a time. You watch your ass down there, Ben.”
D-Day in the Ashes Page 4