“We’re going to be here working the better part of the night,” Ben said, looking around him. “Ike, take your battalion and go after Malone. Before dark, shut it down. Resume the chase at first light and bump me as soon as you make contact.”
With a smile and a sloppy salute, Ike trotted off, hollering for his people to mount up.
“We’ve broken the back of the monster,” Ben said. “But the head and teeth are still venomous. They’ll never fall again into what happened today, so tomorrow morning begins the slow and dangerous job of hunting them down and killing them. Let’s mop it up here and get some rest. We shove off in the morning.”
In his command post in Conrad, Malone was still not functioning at one hundred percent. The shattering news of losing more than half of his men had numbed him.
He had worked for years to build a pure Aryan nation, weeding out the inferiors, with an army of men who would spread his message across the land.
Now it was devastated, destroyed, what was left of his army scattered and demoralized, stumbling around in the darkness like lost children.
All because of Ben Raines and that bunch of inferiors he had gathered around him, clinging like bloodsucking parasites to his every utterance.
Then the thought came to him that while Ben Raines’s Rebels might be made up of inferiors, they had sure kicked his ass and had done it soundly.
“More men coming in, sir,” an aide told him, jarring Malone out of his bitter reverie.
With a sigh, Malone heaved himself out of the chair, forcing himself into action. “Have the women and children been evacuated?”
“Yes, sir. Most of them have been moved toward the wilderness area and the rest will be clear of the town by dawn.”
“How do the men look?”
The aide hesitated, unsure of how to put his answer. He plunged ahead. “Scared, sir. And badly disoriented. More than a few are in some sort of shock. Babbling incoherently.”
Malone suddenly snapped out of his depressed mood, if not completely, at least enough to once more take command and make the necessary decisions. “We can’t spend any time here. Ben Raines will be after us very soon. Treat the more severely wounded and then get everybody onto what trucks we have left. Move them into the wilderness. Go, Carl. We’ll rebuild; that’s a promise.”
When Carl had gone, Malone turned toward the east and muttered, “And I’ll kill you someday, Raines. And that, too, is a promise. For I have God Almighty on my side, you heathenistic nigger lover!”
“How come you look so worried, Pete?” Mac asked. The outlaws had made camp deep in the timber, fixed their meager dinner, and doused the fire. “Ben Raines likes coons. He’d probably pat you on your bald head and make you a colonel or something in his army.”
Pete sighed. “Once again, you have your information all twisted, you redneck. Ben Raines doesn’t give a damn about a person’s skin color.”
“That’s what I just said!”
“No, what I meant is this: Ben Raines will shoot me just as fast as he would you.”
“Well, that don’t make no sense, Pete, not when you takes into consideration that all you people look alike.”
Muttering under his breath, Pete picked up his blankets and moved far away from MacNally. Ignorance could be catching.
Meg Callahan had asked to see a doctor; said she was feeling really rotten. The Rebel hesitated, then reached for the keys. He figured that since she hadn’t caused any trouble up to now, maybe she really was sick. For a fact, she didn’t look so hot. He opened the cell door and Meg jammed stiffened fingers into his throat, smashed his nose with an expert blow, and then using the heel of her hand, drove the cartilage up into his brain. The Rebel was dying as he hit the floor.
She belted his sidearm around her waist and picked up his M16. She slipped out into the hallway and worked her way to the front office. Another Rebel sat at a desk, reading an old magazine.
Damn!
She turned and slipped toward the back. If the luck was with her . . . It was, and the back door was unlocked. Meg Callahan slipped out into the night. Even if someone did spot her, she probably wouldn’t be recognized, since she was still wearing her Rebel tiger-stripe BDUs. She felt pretty good. She had a fully loaded sidearm with two extra clips for it, and a fully loaded M16, with a half-dozen clips for it on the web belt. Now to find out where Ben Raines was and get to him.
So she could kill him. All in the name of and for Malone.
Ashley and Sister Voleta and their remaining troops had beat it when the frantically broadcast news of the ambush reached them. Ashley and Voleta had halted their personal troops at the junction of a gravel road leading south, about ten miles outside of Chester. When they heard the news, they split. At the next intersection, they turned west and both almost had collective heart failure when the next road they came to was 223 and they realized they were only a few miles south of Ben Raines. They sped on across, cut south at the next intersection, and then once more west when they came to a sign telling them that Conrad was sixty miles.
Meg had killed another Rebel with a club and stolen her Jeep. She knew this country and didn’t need road signs or maps to tell her where she was. She wound around a series of county roads until coming to 218 and followed that into Conrad. She arrived just moments after Ashley and Voleta and was stunned to see the place nearly deserted.
“I don’t understand!” she shouted at Malone.
“My dear, listen to me. I’m overjoyed that you’re still alive and free of that jail. But we’ve been badly mauled by the Rebels. We’ve lost, conservatively speaking, sixty percent of our troops. And it took about fifteen minutes for Raines to do it,” he added with the bitter copper taste of defeat on his tongue.
“We’re going back to the wilderness?”
“We have no choice. Raines won’t come in there after us. Even that arrogant, Godless dictator knows that would be a foolish thing to do. We’ll rebuild, Megan. We have time and God on our side.”
Ashley and Sister Voleta exchanged glances at that. Even though the both of them were a couple of bricks shy of a load, they knew they didn’t want to get tied up with some religious fanatic . . . he might pull something like what happened years back down in Jonestown. And Ashley had never acquired a taste for poison.
“You’re welcome to join us, friend,” Malone told Ashley. “Since your ranks are free of inferiors, you obviously are a man who believes in maintaining the purity of the races.”
“Oh, quite, sir. But I fear we must push on at first light. We’re going to gather more troops and strike again at Ben Raines.”
Malone was pleased to hear that. This Ashley fellow seemed to be a man with some breeding behind him and was quite the gentlemen, but that woman with him looked like a witch.
Which she was—a practicing witch of the Dark Arts, known as the Ninth Order.
“I wish you luck,” Malone said.
“Thank you.”
“They’ve bugged out, Ben,” Ike radioed from the deserted town of Conrad. “They left a trail that a fool could follow. Leads straight toward the wilderness area.”
“That’s ten-four, Ike. Do not pursue. Repeat: do not pursue. We’ll deal with them on a later date. Hold what you’ve got. We’ll make Conrad our westernmost outpost. I’ll start tanks and troops out within the hour. Let’s clean out Great Falls.”
Leaving a contingent of Rebels at Haver, busy cleaning up the airport, Ben and his people pulled out about an hour behind the tanks, taking Highway 2 over to Shelby—which turned out to be only a burned-out shell of a town—and then cut south on the Interstate down to Ike’s position at Conrad. There, at Fort Benton, he sent Buddy to take his Rat Team, with one extra platoon of Rebels and a couple of Dusters, on ahead to check out Great Falls.
“Used to be a city of sixty thousand,” Ben said, checking the maps. “It might hold anywhere from five hundred to five thousand creepies.”
“Considering the sparseness of this country—speak
ing in terms of human population, that is,” Dan said, “I would opt for less than a thousand of the buggers.”
“Yeah, I’m with Dan,” Ike said. “This is some of the most beautiful country in the world, but it always was kinda short on people.”
Ben glanced at his watch. “Buddy should be there in about half an hour. Corrie, tell him to take the airport first, if possible, and stay put. We can fly supplies in from Lewistown if the runways are operable.”
“You reckon this Callahan woman linked up with Malone?” Ike asked.
“Yeah . . . probably.”
“I think we all know where our next campaign is going to be,” General Striganov said. “and it damn well better be during the summer or early fall.”
“Yes,” Ben agreed softly. “And Beth has done some figuring on that place.”
“Approximately one hundred and seventy-five miles long, from the Canadian border down to Mullen Pass, near Helena. Approximately one hundred and thirty-five miles deep; that’s over to the Idaho line. That’s roughly twenty-four thousand square miles.”
“Holy shit!” Ike said.
That pretty well summed up everybody’s feelings.
8
“The airport at Great Falls is secure,” Buddy radioed back to his father. “We met some resistance, but it was put down.”
“Runways?”
“Oddly, they are clean and in good shape. And we have taken possession of half a dozen cargo planes, which are also in good shape.”
The people who had gathered around the radio in Malone’s old CP in Conrad all exchanged quick glances, none fully understanding what this latest development meant; but all of them with the same thought, and it was an unsettling one.
“Any estimates on the strength of the creepies in the city?” Ben asked.
“Only a guess, Father,” Buddy radioed. “I would put them at about seven hundred and fifty.”
“Based on what information?”
“Six planes with a capacity of thirty-five human beings. That comes to two hundred and ten people being transported in each month, with each person weighing an average of one hundred and sixty pounds. Say fifty pounds of eatable flesh per person comes to just over ten thousand pounds to consume. We know that the creepies eat only about three times per week. That would give each of the seven hundred fifty Night People in the city approximately fifteen pounds of food a month.”
“Holy Jesus Christ!” Ike blurted, then grimaced and belched.
“His arithmetic is correct,” Beth said.
“Thank you both,” Ben said, his breakfast lying like a lump in his belly.
Dan opened a window for a breath of fresh air.
“Hold what you’ve got, Buddy,” Ben radioed. “We’re moving out within the hour.”
“That’s ten-four, sir,” the son acknowledged.
Ben did not ask if his son had taken any prisoners, or if he had, what to do with them. The Rebels did not take adult Night People prisoners. That was standing operational procedure.
“The slimy, hideous bastards are setting up outposts around the nation!” Dan said, turning from the window, his tanned face mirroring the inner shock and disgust of the man.
“Yes,” Ben said. “That is my feeling.”
“How many fronts are we going to have to fight, Dad?” Tina asked.
Ben cut his hard eyes. “Every one that rears up before us. Everything that stands between us and rebuilding a nation of as much civility that is possible in the times we’re living in. Mount up and move out, people.”
The Rebels made the run down to Great Falls in an hour and a half. Ben spread out his tanks, mortar carriers, and vehicle-drawn 105s facing the east. Planes carrying supplies from Lewistown had already begun landing at the airport by the time Ben arrived.
Standing on an overpass, Ben studied the city through binoculars for a long time. “A lot of history about to go up in flames,” he was heard to mutter. He turned to Corrie. “Bring it down, Corrie.”
She spoke into her mike and the relentless and destroying thunder erupted from the guns of the Rebels. The artillery dropped in WP, HE, and napalm. The gunners took the outer perimeters of the city first, setting it blazing. Then they began walking in rounds, from the outside of the circle inward, offering no creepie any avenue of escape.
The guns roared and spat and thunked their deadly rain all that morning. By noon, the city was a blazing valley of fire and smoke and destruction.
“Shut it down,” Ben ordered. “Troops up to seal it off south and east.”
The Missouri River prevented any escape north and west.
Small-arms fire began popping and cracking as Rebels brought down any creepies who had escaped the artillery barrage and now ran in sheer panic from the flames of the ravaged city. They did not run far.
By two o’clock that afternoon, there were only the sounds of the flames consuming the city, walls of buildings collapsing, and the occasional sounds of explosions as the flames hit pockets of gas or cached supplies of ammunition.
Ben had dispatched teams of Rebels to build fire breaks around the city, to keep the flames from spreading into the countryside.
“We’ll wait here until the fires have burned down to where they present no danger of spreading,” Ben told his people. “Then we’ll mount up and move south to Helena.” He glanced at Buddy. “I want you to take your Rat Team and a platoon down to Helena. Take this route.” He traced it with a finger. “That will take you down to a little place called Canyon Ferry. Cross over and work your way north from there up to the airport at Helena and secure it. Crush any resistance—any resistance—on your way there. Shove off in the morning. Considering the country you’ll be going through, and the condition of the roads, it’ll probably take you a good two days to reach your objective. We’ll pull out on the morning of the second day. It’s about a hundred-mile Interstate run for us. We’ll be sitting on the outskirts of Helena when you make your first thrust at the airport. Any questions?”
“No, sir.”
“Get supplied and ready to move.”
“After Helena?” Ike asked.
“Butte and Bozeman. We bring them all down. And we do it in every state. I am not going to give the creepies a place to hide en masse. We’ll make a complete circle and end the campaign back up at Conrad. We should be finished by mid-June. Then we strike at Malone’s people in the wilderness area.”
“When do we start flybys?” Colonel Rebet of Striganov’s army asked.
“Not until we’ve finished this campaign and are geared up and ready to move into the area. Flybys will be a tip-off for Malone. And something else: we’ve still got those thousand or so outlaws roaming around this state, and then there is Matt Callahan to be reckoned with. We’re going to have a very busy summer, people. It’s going to be anything but a cakewalk.”
“How about outposts in the western parts of Montana?” Ike asked.
“I don’t know, Ike. It’s rough country. I’m thinking that after we clean out Malone and his crud, I just may let the animals have it. All the way from the Canadian border down to Butte. We may try to set up something around Dillon. We’ll just have to wait and see how things work out.” He turned to Striganov. “How are things up in your part of Canada now that Malone has been, ah, relocated, so to speak?”
“Getting back to normal. I spoke with home base this morning. There’s been no more trouble. Ben? We’re in this to the finish. We’re not going to go off and leave it half-done. My people are under your command. It’s going to be a big, big job.”
Ben folded his map case. “Well, let’s get to it, then.”
Beerbelly was unhappy and getting more so with each passing day. Pete Jones was getting delusions of grandeur and he was going to get them all killed if he followed through with his plans.
Beerbelly had not been an outlaw all his life, but he had a full decade of outlawing behind him. He’d been unhappy with it for some months . . . No, that wasn’t entirely the truth. He had,
for some months, begun to realize that Ben Raines was not going to be stopped. Raines was going to bring law and order back to the battered nation. And he was, to put it quite simply, going to kill anybody who stood in his way. Ben Raines, Beerbelly knew, did not give a damn for constitutional rights. He was like an unstoppable steamroller, and if you were dumb enough to stand in his way, then, hell, you deserved what you got—and that was to be flattened like a damn pancake.
“What’s the matter with you, Beer?” one of his cohorts in outlawing asked. “You been walkin’ around with your lower lip draggin’ the ground for two-three days.”
“It’s over, Hoss. It’s all over.”
“What’s all over?” the man nicknamed Hoss asked, sitting down beside Beerbelly. Nobody knew Beerbelly’s real name.
“Us.”
Hoss looked at him. “What’d you been tokin’ on, Beer? You sound plumb pro-found.”
“Hoss ... what’d you think about Pete’s plans for us?”
“Well, I don’t think too much of ’em, to tell the truth about it. I think Pete’s done bit off more than he can chew. What about you?”
“I feel the same way. The other guys?”
“Oh, they all for it. They’re gonna ride into Butte and strike a deal with those turrible cannibals and together they’re gonna whup Ben Raines.”
“So they think.”
“Yeah. You got that right, man.” He cut his eyes to Beerbelly. “Beer, there ain’t nobody never gonna whup Ben Raines.”
“That’s exactly my point, Hoss. Anybody with any sense knows it’s over for guys like us. Oh, there’s always gonna be people foolish enough to try Raines. People like Malone and that Ashley person. Raines will be fighting from now on out. But he ain’t gonna be fightin’ none of me.”
“What are you gonna do, Beer?”
“I’m gettin’ out, Hoss. I’m gonna check it all to them. I’m givin’ it up. I’m gonna find me a woman that wants to settle down and raise me a garden and some hogs and chickens and so forth. I might have me some kids.”
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