Death in the Ashes

by William W. Johnstone

  Dan and Tina took no prisoners. Ben had said that anyone who aligned himself with the Night People was to be shown no mercy.

  No mercy was shown.

  Bikers and outlaws tried to surrender from out of the bombarded town. A few tried. Those who watched them shot down resigned themselves to their fate with either a curse or a long-forgotten-until-now prayer for forgiveness from their Maker.

  God’s mercenary, Michael, mighty warrior that he is, probably got a good laugh out of that, for the skies over that area of the state suddenly began to darken from what had previously been a clear blue and a hard rain began to fall, accompanied by wicked lightning and rolling peals of thunder.

  The relentless bombardment continued through the storm and the rain as mortars thunked and cannon howled and boomed, and snipers patiently waited for targets to bring down, all combining to hurl Rebel justice down upon the occupied town.

  Several hundred escaped the ruined town, slipping out furtively, large humans emulating the disease-carrying and beady-eyed rats that they really were.

  Ben ordered the bombardment shut down after an hour. The town lay smoking and silent.

  “Do we go in?” Buddy asked.

  “No,” Ben said. “To hell with those in there. It’s only about twenty miles to Butte. We take it down this day. There is no really effective way I can find on any map to get you and your team south of the city to the airport. You spearhead the column, stay on the Interstate, and start marking out artillery positions when you get there.”

  Deuce and a halves with scrapers on the front were used to shove aside the mess on the Interstate just south of the town. Bodies and vehicles were pushed unceremoniously into the ditches. No attempt was made to bury anyone.

  Ben and his people had declared a no-holds-barred war on the crud that roamed the land, preying on those who were trying to rebuild from out of the ashes. The Rebels offered no mercy, no compassion, no sympathy . . . and no surrender.

  “Jesus God!” MacNally whispered, watching from a brush-covered ridge as the Rebels mounted up and pulled out from the ravaged town, heading south toward Butte. “Them people ain’t human!”

  Bruiser sat in shock at the suddenness of the attack and the harshness with which his friends had been dealt. Even Satan was having a hard time believing the ruthlessness of the Rebels. The big man finally shook himself out of his slight daze.

  “They ain’t gonna get away with it,” he announced, standing up. “I’m gonna kill Ben Raines. I don’t know how I’m gonna do it. But I’m gonna do it.” He moved toward his motorcycle.

  “Where you goin’, Satan?” Mac called.

  Satan turned around. “Ben Raines is makin’ a big circle, clearin’ this state of Night People and outlaws. It don’t take no genius to figger that out. And I betya on the final leg, he’s gonna go after Snake, over there where that soldier boy got hisself and all them men killed a hundred and some-odd years back. Puddin’, custard . . . something like that.”

  “General Custer,” Bass said.

  “Yeah, that’s him.”

  “So?”

  “I’m gonna be there waitin’ on Ben Raines, boys.” He held out his massive hands. “And I’m gonna tear him apart with my bare hands.”

  “That’d be a sight to see, all right,” Wanda allowed. “I think me and the girls will just ease over that way with you.”

  “You’re welcome to ride along.” He looked at the still-shaken gathering. “Anybody else?”

  One by one, those remaining outlaws stood up and walked toward their motorcycles and cars and pickup trucks.

  “We gotta do something, man,” Morgan muttered. “It ain’t no fun out here with Ben Raines on the prowl. Not to mention that it ain’t safe neither.”

  Matt Callahan stood in the valley of the Little Big Horn, his horse picketed nearby. He felt it in his bones: Ol’ Slim was a-comin’. He knowed it was gonna be thisaway all along. Ol’ Slim and him would step out to face each other and they’d take that walk that would be a one-way stroll for one of them. And just about when fifty feet separated them, they’d both drag iron and commence to lettin’ the hammers down and the lead flyin’.

  Matt drew, cocked, and fired in one experienced and very fast move. He plugged a small tree.

  Smiling with satisfaction, Snake punched out the empty brass and filled the cylinder up. He didn’t twirl his guns; that was for tinhorns and punks.

  He sat his Colt down in leather and walked over to the river, scooping up water in the palm of his hand and drinking. He suddenly whirled and drew his left-hand Colt and killed a piece of driftwood.

  “Let Ol’ Slim beat that,” he muttered.

  When the bombs came, the period that history would call the Great War, Matt Callahan had snapped. Already not too-tightly wrapped, Matt had spent the first few years tracking down and killing any writer of “dirty books” that he could find. Fortunately, he couldn’t find too many of them; but he got a great deal of satisfaction out of killing those he could find. Especially those who write those dirty Westerns. Hard, tough, straight-shootin’ cowboys in th real old West just didn’t do the things that were so vividly and profanely outlined in the pages of those filthy books. Everybody knew that. Cowboys stood tall in the saddle and said “howdy” and “ma’am” and they didn’t say bad words. And they especially didn’t use their big toe in a manner like that cowboy did in one of those adult Western books. Matt knew that for a fact. He’d tried it with one of his girlfriends. Threw his back out of whack and couldn’t walk for two weeks.

  The only thing that Matt could say good about Ben Raines was that he hadn’t written any really dirty books.

  But that didn’t make no difference. Snake was gonna gun him down like the low-down skunk he was.

  Ashley and Sister Voleta had drifted down south. They had lost about half of their people and that had turned them very cautious. They had wound their way south, and were now camped just south of Crazy Peak in the Gallatin National Forest. They spent their time monitoring radio transmissions from the Night People and Ben Raines’s Rebels.

  And they knew Ben was winning.

  “Damn him!” Voleta said. “And damn that bastard son of mine.”

  Ashley didn’t pay her any attention. He was used to her rantings and ravings. He waited until she had wound down and said, “I think, my dear, that Montana has withdrawn the welcome mat for us. Rather rudely jerked it out from under our feet would be more like it.”

  “Then carry your ass,” she bluntly told him.

  “What do you hope to gain by staying?”

  “A chance to kill Ben Raines.”

  “Voleta, I have been trying to kill that man for years. Our day will come, believe me. But it isn’t in the cards this time around. Our armies have been halved. We simply don’t have the manpower to fight the Rebels.”

  But the woman was unshakable. “I intend to stay right here, monitoring Ben Raines’s moves. There is plenty of game to hunt, and we have water and shelter. We all need a rest and right here is as good a place as any.”

  “Might I suggest a better place?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Further south. On the Wyoming-Montana border. In the Custer National Forest.”

  “Why there?”

  “Because the Rebels have already cleaned out Sheridan. They won’t be expecting us to move in that close to a secure area.”

  Voleta thought about that for a moment. “All right. That sounds good to me.”

  The early summer campaign was winding down and Ben sensed its closing. It had been a brief campaign, but a highly successful one. For the most part, Montana was clear of human crud with outposts put securely in place. Ben was looking forward to a week’s rest before tackling Malone and his bunch.

  But, he thought with a barely audible sigh, there still remained some unfinished business.

  Matt Callahan aka the Rattlesnake Kid.

  Ben knew a lot of bikers and other outlaws had broken free of the assault
on Anaconda. Had they retreated only to once more link up with Matt? It was a possibility that he had to consider. And how about Ashley and Voleta—where were they? Wherever they were, they were keeping their heads down and staying off the radio, for communications had heard nothing from them.

  The ambush up north had cut deeply into the troops of Ashley and Voleta, but they still had enough men to be a problem. And it worried Ben because nothing had been heard from them. Ashley could be just as sneaky as Ben; there were lots of differences between the men, but the main difference was that Ashley was a coward.

  Not so with Sister Voleta and her troops of the Ninth Order. She was a nut, but one with cunning and courage. Neither she nor Ashley could be discounted. Not yet.

  And how in the hell was he going to flush Matt out of the Rosebuds without losing some people and wasting a lot of time?

  Ben couldn’t just turn his back on Matt, postponing the showdown until a later date—as much as he would like to do that—for the man would only rebuild his army and resume his warlord activities.

  No, Matt had to be taken out during this sweep. With that done, Montana, from the Continental Divide over to Miles City, would be clean.

  Ben smiled faintly, thinking: Only forty-nine states to go.

  11

  The Night People had pulled out of Butte. They had seen the futility of fighting Ben Raines on his own terms and had gathered their stinking robes about them and slithered away. The city lay silent and stinking under the sun.

  “Check it out and bring it down,” Ben ordered.

  The Rebels spent the rest of that day and much of the night carefully going over the deserted city. No prisoners were found; obviously the creepies had taken their food supply with them as they bugged out.

  The next morning, Ben’s Rebels began destroying the city with explosvies while Georgi Striganov and his troops moved on over to Bozeman.

  “Nothing,” the Russian radioed back. “The town is as deserted as a grave.”

  “Interesting way of putting it, Georgi,” Ben replied. “Start bringing it down, please.”

  Ben pulled his Rebels over and spent the night in a small town on the banks of the Missouri River, about halfway between Butte and Bozeman. His people were tired, and Ben was tired. They had circled the state in a very short time, with all of them pushing themselves hard. The Rebels had taken very few casualties, but they were, to a person, very weary. Ben made up his mind that after Bozeman was destroyed, they would travel the Interstate for a few more miles, and then stand down for a few days, doing routine maintenance on the vehicles, checking weapons, and resting. Then they would move against Matt Callahan and those still with him.

  Ben felt he knew what Matt wanted him to do, but damned if he was going to oblige the man. Ben had no intentions of any such foolishness as standing up and quick-drawing like a scene out of some grade B Western movie.

  At the airport in Bozeman, while the city burned, the Rebels checked out the aircraft the creepies had left behind them and found several planes in excellent shape. Ben radioed for pilots to be flown in to fly them out.

  The Rebel convoy moved on. At a small town on the Yellowstone River, Ben halted the long column and told his people to relax and have some fun for a change. The Rebels were unaware that just south of them, the bikers and outlaws were gathering, and Ashley and Sister Voleta had joined them.

  “We’re still no match for them,” Ashley warned. “I hate to keep harping on that, but Raines has, with the addition of the Russian’s troops, about four battalions of troops.”

  Satan glared at him. “So what do you have in mind, pretty boy?”

  “We pull this ragtag bunch of misfits into some sort of fighting force while we’re waiting to see what Raines does. I have a hunch that he’s going to launch a summer campaign against Malone up in the wilderness. Now while we’re training, we add to our strength by pulling in all the smaller groups of . . . ah”—he looked around with some disdain—“outlaws and bikers. Then when Raines commits his troops into the wilderness, we go in behind him and box them in.”

  Satan squatted his bulk down and eyeballed—as best he could—Ashley. Finally he nodded his head. “All right,” he said slowly. “I’ll go along with that.”

  “Voleta?” Ashley asked.

  The woman took her time in replying. “If I agree to go along with that—and I haven’t said I would—the campaign is going to have to be very carefully worked out. Malone has to be notified, and not by radio. Raines would pinpoint us in a flash. We are going to have to be just as sophisticated in warfare as Ben Raines. And that means coming up with weapons that are on a par with his. Tanks are out of the question; they would be useless in the wilderness. But heavy machine guns and mortars—with people who know how to use them—will be essential. Discipline is something else. Your bunch of bikers and outlaws, Satan, have no discipline. You’re going to have to put some steel in their backbones and make them understand that for this operation to succeed, they must follow orders and do so without question.”

  “Who gives the orders?” Satan rumbled.

  “The mercenary, Kenny Parr, had a son. The boy is now a grown man and commanding a large group down in Florida.”

  “Who the hell is Kenny Parr?”

  “A mercenary who used to work for President Hilton Logan. A man named Kasim killed him years ago. But not before Parr taught his son to hate Ben Raines and everything he stood for.”

  “How many men?” Ashley asked. Voleta was a constant source of amazement to him. It seemed that she knew every army of warlords and outlaws in what used to be the United States. And Ashley also knew that Voleta had more troops than she ever let him know about. She had Ninth Order people all over the country.

  “About a thousand. But they are well trained and disciplined troops, skilled in the use of mortars and machine guns and rocket launchers.”

  “In other words,” Satan said, a nasty tone to the question, “they’re professionals and we’re a bunch of bums and no-goods?”

  There was no back-down in Voleta. She returned the glare and said, “Yes.”

  Satan smiled his horrible disfigured grin. “You a gutsy bitch, I’ll give you that much.” Then he shrugged. “All right, I’ll take orders from this Parr.” He looked at Ashley. “How about you, fancy pants?”

  “I ran you out of Kansas once, you ugly bastard—remember?”

  Satan smiled. “Yeah . . . so you did. That’s when you was pimpin’ for King Louie. So what about it?”

  “Just keep it in mind. And also keep in mind that when you put a hand on me, probably twelve or fifteen of my men will shoot you so full of holes you’ll be dead before you hit the ground.”

  Satan looked around him. True enough, about a dozen of Ashley’s men were nearby, the muzzles of their guns ready to come up and blow him all to hell and gone.

  “All right, Ashley,” Satan verbally backed away. “You and me will work together. But when Ben Raines is dead, and we start splittin’ up the country, you and me will stake our claims far apart.”

  “That suits me.”

  Satan walked away.

  Voleta watched him go and said, “We will use the lout and his kind to achieve our goals, then we can dispose of him.”

  “And doing that will be a pleasure, Voleta. How do we get word to Parr?”

  “I’ll send some of my people. I’ll dispatch them this afternoon. They’ll go down into Colorado to one of my cells and send a coded message to the mercenary. He can be here in a week or ten days.”

  “It certainly would be a much nicer place to live without Ben Raines around,” Ashley said wistfully. “I am so looking foward to the day.”

  “Not nearly as much as I am.” Voleta spat the words like an angry snake.

  There were dozens of questions that Ashley would have liked to ask, but each time he had tried to bring up the personal side of Voleta—such as her real name—she brusquely rebuffed him. And only once had he asked her about her son Buddy. T
he look she gave him silently warned him not to bring it up again.

  “So you’re in?” Ashley asked.

  “All the way. Until either I am dead, or Ben Raines is rotting in his grave.”

  Ben woke up that night bathed in sweat. He had worked his way through and out of the damnest nightmare he’d experienced in years. Someone had conked him on the head and tied him to a stake . . . then brush was piled all around his bare feet and the brush ignited.

  He was being burned alive, and as he screamed while the flames licked at his flesh, Sister Voleta and her Ninth Order stood and grinned.

  He awakened and flung the covers from him, his chest heaving, trying to catch his breath.

  “Damn!” Ben whispered as he dressed and stepped outside for a breath of air.

  A sentry was by his side almost instantly. “Something wrong, General?” she asked.

  “Before he could answer, Buddy stepped out of the shadows and said, “My mother.”

  The sentry knew that Buddy was the son of Ben Raines through an affair with a Nashville woman years back, before the Great War, and father and son had been united only a few years back.

  She knew that Buddy’s mother was the leader of that strange and dangerous group called the Ninth Order. And she also knew that Buddy possessed some sort of mysticism about him ... no doubt about that, his mother being a witch. The sentry moved away, sensing that family business was about to be discussed.

  “What about your mother, son?” Ben asked.

  “She is very close.”

  “How do you know these things, boy?”

  “I don’t know, Father. I just do. The Old One, my grandfather, once told me I was born marked, and could have gone either way; that being good or evil, I suppose.”

  “Marked . . . how?”

  “I don’t know, Father. He never brought it up after that one time.”

  “What’s got your hackles up about your mother?”

  “I had a dream. A nightmare. I was being burned at the stake. That is my mother’s favorite way of punishing those who violate her rules. You should know.”