Alone in the Ashes

by William W. Johnstone

  “No human being has the right to enslave another human being,” Ben said. “Not even if the person being enslaved is filth like you. I’ve heard the name Rani. What about her?”

  “You ask a lot of questions for a man about to die, mister.”

  Ben stood quietly, meeting the man’s gaze.

  “Rani’s a broad that takes in homeless kids. Used to be up in Oklahoma ’til some warlord got to want to fuck her steady—her and the kids.” He grinned. “We think she’s took up livin’ over to Terlingua. Now me and my boys are goin’ over there and git her and them sweet young kids of her’n.”

  “No,” Ben said softly.

  “No! Whut the hell you talkin’ ’bout now, boy? Huh?”

  “I said no.”

  “Well, just how in the hell are you figurin’ on stoppin’ us, mister?”

  Ben smiled. “When you human trash meet the devil, tell him Ben Raines sent you.”

  “Ben Raines!” one man shouted.

  Ben stepped from behind cover and lifted the Thompson, pulling the trigger, working the weapon from left to right, spraying the filth, fighting the natural rise of the powerful submachine gun.

  The .45-caliber, hollow-point ACP slugs slammed the men around in the road and sprayed blood into the air and onto the sands. The men fell to the highway, dying in their own blood.

  Ben inspected the bodies and took two of their M-16’s and two of their pistols. He removed all their ammo belts and left them where they had fallen, their features twisted in that one last hot moment of dying.

  He pulled the boy off the highway and then went to find the men’s vehicles. The trucks were about five hundred yards up the road. Using one of his blankets to wrap the boy (Ben could not bear the thought of wrapping the boy in one of the outlaws’ blankets; he could give the boy that much, anyway), Ben dug a shallow grave and covered it with rocks to keep the coyotes and dogs from digging up the remains and eating them.

  He and Jordy broke camp and loaded up, driving back up the road to the dead men’s pickups. There, Ben found boxes of ammo and cans of water; several cases of food and five five-gallon cans of gasoline.

  Ben looked at Jordy and grinned. “Think you could drive one of these trucks, Jordy?”

  “I reckon I could if I set my mind to it, Ben.”

  “Well, all right, then. Let’s just spend the morning having you practicing, then. How does that sound?”

  “Better than a kick in the ass with a steel-toed boot, Ben,” the boy replied with a grin.

  Just after the sun had broken over the horizon, Rani had thought she heard the faint sounds of gunfire. She thought they came from the west, but she couldn’t be certain of either the shots or the direction.

  Rani ran her fingers through her light brown hair, cut short. She was glad there were no mirrors in the old house; she must look like the devil.

  She walked outside and stood for a time on the breezeway of the home.

  Where have the years gone? she silently questioned. It seemed to her that she had been fighting for survival all her life—even though she knew that wasn’t true. She turned her green eyes toward the west and wondered how many tomorrows she had left?

  That’s stupid! she thought. No one has the power to know that.

  In her early thirties, Rani was more beautiful now than when she had been a cheerleader in high school. Only now, hers was a mature woman’s beauty. She was, she often thought with a smile, just vaguely remembering the old TV commercial, a full-breasted woman. She leaned her five foot, four inch frame against one of the columns of the old house and once more looked out over the quiet ruins, her arms folded under her breasts.

  She thought: I still don’t have enough books or paper and pencils for the kids. Have to make do with what I have. I can’t chance another run outside this area.

  She shook her head and walked inside to make a pot of tea. Tea, it seemed, was still relatively easy to come by. People would pass up the little tins of tea in their search for coffee.

  The kids were still asleep.

  She quietly fixed her tea, and with a handful of crackers, walked back outside to sit on the porch.

  She was certain she had heard gunshots. And that made her very uneasy.

  Jordy practiced for several hours behind the wheel of the smaller truck. For a kid who had never driven in his life, the boy caught on very fast. He, of course, was no expert, but he could keep it between the ditches. And the going was very slow, anyway, the highways in such bad shape. Averaging thirty mph was doing very well.

  They pulled out at eleven o’clock that morning. Terlingua was only about three miles away.

  On the outskirts of the ghost town, Ben pulled over and told Jordy to stay in his truck while he prowled a bit. Smiling, Ben thought the warning a bit unnecessary. It would have taken a team of mules to forcibly remove the boy from behind the wheel.

  Ben’s trained eyes soon picked up on someone’s attempts to hide vehicle tracks. It had been a pretty good job, but not done by an expert. And after fifteen minutes of looking, Ben straightened up, a puzzled look on his face. The footprints he’d found were all small.

  He searched the ruins, suddenly sensing he was not alone. His eyes kept drifting to the big house overlooking the ruins. He walked toward the house.

  Just the faintest finger of smoke came from the chimney.

  The small footprints led straight to the house.

  Standing beside a crumbling old adobe building, Ben called, “Hello, the house. I’m friendly. Anybody home?”

  A bullet whined off the adobe, sending chunks of it flying. The slug missed Ben’s head by only a couple of inches. He ducked back.

  “Now, Vic!” a woman’s voice came to him. “Now, I’ve got you. And this time I’m going to kill you.”

  18

  “Madam,” Ben called. “My name is not Vic. If you will put away that cannon you’re firing at me, I’ll sling my weapon and step out with my hands in the air. I’m traveling with a small boy named Jordy. He’s with the trucks about a quarter of mile west of here. My name is Ben Raines.”

  “You’re a goddamned liar!” Rani yelled. “General Raines is a thousand miles east of here.”

  “Is your name Rani?” Ben called.

  “Yes.” This time, the reply was softer.

  Briefly, Ben told her, from his hiding place behind the adobe, the events of that morning. He ended with, “... I killed the men who had kept the boy enslaved. They were thoroughly despicable types.”

  “Oh, God!” he heard her say. “The whole world’s gone mad.”

  “Not all of us, Rani. Believe me, there are pockets of civilized behavior still to be found.”

  “Step out, Mr. Raines.”

  Taking a deep breath, Ben slung his Thompson and stepped out from behind the old building, his hands in the air.

  A very shapely lady stepped out onto the long porch. She held an AR-15 in her hands.

  “Ben!” Jordy called. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine, Jordy,” Ben called. “Stay where you are until I come for you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Rani lowered the rifle. She walked from the porch to the old stone fence around the mansion and stood looking down at Ben. “I’m Rani Jordan, Mr. Raines. Nice to meet you.”

  “You might change your mind, Miss Jordan. I think I’ve got about half the outlaws and warlords in the southwest chasing me.”

  “I think I know the feeling,” Rani told him. “I don’t know the other warlords after me, but I do know Crazy Vic. Cowboy Vic. And he is crazy. Dresses like Sunset Carson, or one of those old-time cowboys. But don’t sell him short. He looks stupid with those six-guns hanging left and right; but he’s rattlesnake quick with them, and a dead shot with rifle or pistol. Do you know how many men we have chasing us?”

  “I’d say about six hundred,” Ben informed her.

  Rani paled under her summer tan. “Six hundred? Are you serious?”

  “Oh, yes. So I would
suggest we join forces and try to stay alive.”

  “But there’s only two of us!” she protested. “We can’t fight six hundred men.”

  “Sure, we can,” Ben said brightly. “Unless you want to surrender to them.”

  “No way!” she said grimly.

  “Then we fight to stay alive and free. There is no other way.”

  Colonel Gray and his company of Rebels were literally fighting their way across Mississippi, then into Louisiana. It seemed they were in a firefight every twenty-five miles.

  And race had once more reared up.

  Everybody, or so it seemed, was fighting everybody else.

  “Madness!” Colonel Gray said. “If there was ever a time for everyone to work together, this is it. Why can’t they see that?”

  Every thirty or forty miles, the heavily armed convoy of Rebels would enter some new warlord’s territory, and the fighting would begin anew.

  So far, the Rebels had suffered no deaths among their ranks; but several had been wounded, one seriously. About thirty-fives miles inside Louisiana, scouts reported a pocket of resistance; a group of people just trying to survive and get on with the business of living. The wounded Rebel was left at the small clinic there and Colonel Gray and his company moved on westward.

  Captain Nolan and his platoon were dug in, fighting what appeared to be several hundred outlaws. Nolan was not worried about being overrun by the outlaws, for they appeared to be disorganized and very undisciplined. The Rebels were occupying a half block of brick buildings in a small Central Texas town. They had plenty of food and water and ammo. But they were stuck.

  “Nothing?” Cecil asked the radio operator.

  “Not a thing except heavy static, sir. Nothing from General Raines, Colonel Gray, or Captain Nolan.”

  “Does the wall of static appear to be worsening?” Ike asked.

  “Yes, sir. I can’t even reach our guard towers.”

  “Shit!” Ike said.

  “My sentiments exactly,” Cecil said.

  Ben repositioned the trucks Rani had hidden, this time putting all of them into the building to the side of the house.

  “We may have to make a break for it,” Ben explained. “We’ll want the vehicles as close as possible.”

  Ben studied the town and the surrounding terrain. “We’re in a good defensive position,” he finally said.

  All the supplies except for a three-day supply of food, water, and gasoline were removed from the trucks. Ben and Rani, with the bigger kids helping, began stockpiling wood, finally filling up one room of the house with fuel.

  Ben left four M-16’s and plenty of ammo for each upstairs, one rifle at each end of the house, another at the front and one at the back.

  “I don’t know why,” Ben said to Rani, “but I have yet to see a warlord who had any artillery of any sort.”

  “It could be,” Rani said with a wry grin, “that they can’t find any. Probably due to the fact your Rebels took it all.”

  Ben returned her grin. “Now you just may have a point there, lady. We have been known to commandeer certain items necessary for survival and self-defense.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Both felt that tiny elusive spark begin bouncing around between them. And with personalities as volatile as those of Ben and Rani, that spark was sure to ignite something. Very soon.

  While Ben and Rani were cooking supper, Jordy sat with the other young people. Jordy was held in young awe by the others for being the traveling companion of Ben Raines.

  Ben and Rani both noticed the kids were conversing in very low tones.

  “Talking about you, Ben,” she said.

  “Yes. And I can just imagine what they’re saying.”

  “They think you’re a god, you know?”

  “I know. I have some among my own people—adults—who believe that. I’ve done everything I know to do to dispel that crap.”

  “You haven’t seen the shrines that were built in your name?”

  “No. And if I ever do, I’ll tear the goddamned things down.”

  “The people might shoot you if you try that.”

  “Not me,” Ben said with a laugh. “I’m a god, haven’t you heard?”

  “Get serious!”

  Ben did not tell her about the old man he—and many others—had seen. The man who called himself The Prophet. Rani, Ben felt, had enough to occupy her mind without that added mystery.

  Unless she had already encountered the old man. If she had, though, she wasn’t mentioning it.

  Ben pitched his tent in a clear spot between the house and the storage shed. He left Jordy to spend the night inside the house, with the other kids.

  In his blankets, before sleep touched him with a soft velvet hand, Ben reviewed the situation. There was always a chance they would not be found hiding out in the old ghost town, but those chances were slim. He guessed correctly that Jake Campo and West had teamed up with other smaller bands of outlaws and warlords and had spread out, searching for them. It might take them several weeks, but they would eventually reach the ghost town.

  He turned in his blankets, listening to the wind sing around the canvas.

  There wasn’t a town within a hundred miles of Terlingua where he could go to find materials to make more bombs. So that was out.

  Ben smiled in the darkness. It was a warrior’s grim upturning of the corners of his mouth as a plan came into his mind.

  Maybe he could even the odds a bit more. Yes. He’d get on that first thing in the morning.

  He closed his eyes and let sleep gently take him into that long dark slide. The face of Rani stayed with him in sleep.

  Lovely.

  “Both of us will have to stress the importance of staying within the area outlined,” he told Rani.

  They sat on the edge of the porch; there were no chairs in the ghost town. They ate cold beans and crackers and sipped hot tea.

  “You have a strange mind, Ben,” Rani said. “And I suppose mine is, too. Here we sit, sipping tea and discussing how best to kill—hideously—several dozen men.”

  “Get used to it, Rani. Civilization as we both knew it is gone. Probably forever. From now on, for as long as we live, for as long as those kids in the house live, it will be pure survival of the strongest. Those who are best prepared—mentally and physically—will have the better chances for a long life. The others will die. It’s just that simple.”

  She shuddered beside him.

  “Cold?”

  “No,” she said. She cut her green eyes and stared at Ben. “You enjoy it, don’t you, Ben?”

  Ben knew what she meant. He had been asked the question many times before, by many other women he was either involved with, or about to be. “Enjoy what, Rani?”

  Shades of Jerre, Rosita, Gale, Dawn ... how many others?

  “The fighting,” she said simply.

  “When I was a young man, Rani—not even out of my teens—back during the closing days of the Vietnam War, I, along with many other men, discovered there is a high, so to speak, to be found in combat. Yes, I suppose I do enjoy the fighting, in a perverse sort of way. I am a man of order and discipline, Rani. I have no patience with those who steal, loot, rape, molest, kill wantonly. And, to make a contradictory statement, I will do my best to dispose of those types of people whenever I find them.”

  “When this is over, Ben, if we come out of this alive ...”

  “We will,” Ben assured her.

  “... I want to join your people.”

  “You’d certainly be welcome, dear. You and the kids.”

  She again stared at the man, sitting calmly on the porch, munching on a cracker. “You’re not even worried about our ... our problem, are you?”

  “Worrying puts gray in the hair, dear. I have enough of that. No, Rani, all we can do is prepare for what’s coming at us, then lay back and stay alert. Chewing our fingernails won’t help a bit.”

  “You’re incredible!”

  “Thank you,” Ben said
with a grin.

  19

  With Rani carefully mapping out each open pit Ben covered, the two of them—with Jordy, Robert, and Kathy helping—began rigging his deadly traps.

  First, Ben spent two hours gathering thin poles and strips of wood, just long enough to cover the yawning holes. Then, using bits of canvas, rags, old newspapers—whatever he could find to serve the purpose—Ben covered the support poles. He then sprinkled those with a very thin layer of sand and pebbles. When he was finished with each hole, it looked as natural as the terrain surrounding it.

  “Robert, Kathy, Jordy,” Ben said. “This is no-man’s-land out here. It’ll be up to you three to see that the other kids don’t come near here. You all understand that?”

  They did.

  The five of them spent the next two days gathering material for Ben to make his booby traps. They worked from dawn to dusk, taking few breaks. When they had finished, they had covered the opening of dozens of deep shafts.

  “How far do these things go down into the ground, Ben?” Jordy asked.

  “Some of them might drop for as much as a thousand feet, son,” Ben told him. “Now that this is done, I’ve got to find and map out a bunny hole.”

  “A what?” Rani asked.

  “No animal has just one hole to run into, Rani,” Ben explained. “They’ll have several more holes, escape routes, all camouflaged.”

  Leaving Rani to guard the kids, Ben packed a small rucksack with emergency gear and began his exploration of the terrain around the ghost town. He worked in an everwidening circle until he found a narrow ravine running northeast from the town, toward Highway 118.

  Back at the house, Ben packed up several sacks of food, water, blankets, and groundsheets. With Jordy and Robert helping, he cached those supplies and several spare weapons near the ravine, carefully hiding them. He then took the small truck the survivalist had buried and Rani had found, and tucked it into the ravine, with spare cans of gas in the back. The truck was brown, and dirty from road use, and it blended in with the surroundings.