Out of the Ashes (10 page)

She patted her perfect hair. “Claude Raines, the actor, was your uncle? Why, you never told us....” Then she saw his smile and knew he was kidding her. “You bastard!”

Their mutual hatred went back more than a decade. Midwesterners are difficult people to impress, and so inherited money does not impress most rural midwesterners—not those with any sense. Fran Lantier Piper had piles of money stacked all around her... from both sides of her family, and the family she had married into, but in the past hundred years neither she nor any one related to her had worked for a penny of it.

Ben's fifth novel—and he had received a little movie money from that one—had been about spoiled southern brats and inherited money and arrogance. Fran had told him—at a chance meeting at the public library (it came as a shock to Ben to discover she even knew how to read)—that she thought he should be run out of town for writing such nasty filthy lies about good decent gentle people.

Ben had laughed at her.

Furious, she had raced home and told her big brother, Lance, a local football hero, all about her encounter with that Yankee ruffian, embellishing the story substantially, with much batting of eyes and no small amount of tears and posturing. Lance had telephoned Ben, telling him he should be prepared to fight.

Ben had broken up with laughter. “You're really going to defend her honor?”

“I'm a-goin' to stomp you,” Lance had drawled.

When Lance got out of the hospital, after a short stay in ICU, the Lantier family had tried—in the best southern tradition—to have Ben run out of town. Ben had weathered the short but furious storm of emotions and the situation had cooled over the years. But bad blood remained.

“You look puurrfectly chaarrmin' today, Miss Fran.” Ben laid on enough syrup to drown a cat. He leaned against his truck. “Out for a little stroll among the bodies?”

“Your humor is gruesome, Raines.”

“Well,”—Ben opened the door to the truck—“I guess I'll be seeing you, baby.”

“Wait!” she screamed at him. “You can't leave me out here.”

Ben looked at her. “Why the hell not? You don't care for my company and I sure as hell don't want to listen to you bitch all day.”

“Because... because ...” She looked at him, sensing he meant every word she had just heard. And he certainly did. “What kind of man are you?”

“The kind of man who doesn't like spoiled brats who run home and tell lies about people. Does that ring a bell, Fran?”

“Well ... you beat him up, didn't you? Probably fought dirty, though.”

“Fran?”

“What?”

“Fuck you!”

Tears began rolling down her cheeks. Whether they were real or staged for his benefit, Ben wasn't sure. But he closed the door to the pickup and waited, figuring the next few moments should be interesting . . . at least. He glanced around for dogs. None in sight.

“My husband is dead, in that house,” she pointed to a mansion across the road. Ben reminded her that just down the road two elderly people had died when they could not afford to pay their electric bill and the power company had cut off their electricity. They had died of exposure.

She shook her head. “I had nothing to do with that.”

“They also had nothing to eat in the house, Fran. They were your neighbors.”

“Those
people?
My
neighbors?”

“Skip it, Fran. People like you never understand.”

“Why didn't you help them if you're such a charitable person?”

“I didn't know anything about their condition.”

Again, she shook her head. “I don't know if my sister is alive, or not. She went to New Orleans the day ... whatever happened happened. My mother and father are dead. I don't know where Lance is—”

“And I don't give a shit where he is,” Ben told her, and meant it.

“... And you're not making this easy for me!” she screamed at him.

“Why should I?” Ben looked at her. “I just don't like people of your ilk. But I'll be damned if I'm going to stand out in the middle of a road and discuss it with you.”

She stamped her foot. “Well ... at least take me into Natchez. I have friends there. I'm ... well ... I'm afraid to go alone, Ben.”

“Take you into Natchez?” Ben fell against the truck and laughed. “Are you serious, Fran?”

“Perfectly.” Her chin came up haughtily.

“Fran, don't you know what has happened?”

“No. There is nothing on the television or radio. But it was something of a disaster, I should imagine.”

“And it's all going to get better in a little while?”

“Certainly. The government will come in and straighten everything out.”

Big Brother will take care of me. “Fran, instead of Natchez, would you like me to take you to Tara?”

“There you go again, being flip.”

She really doesn't know, Ben thought, looking at her. She is a beautiful woman, though. Poor little insulated rich girl doesn't have an inkling of what happened. He reached into the truck and took out the world-band radio.

“Fran, listen to this. Try to understand what has happened.” He turned on the radio, preset on the distant ham band, and he watched her face as the tape changed to English.

“I ... I don't understand,” she finally said, her face white with shock.

“It means, Fran, that civilization, as we know it, is probably over for a time. Millions, a couple of billion, dead. As for Natchez, forget it. Forget it all, honey.” His voice took on a harsher tone. “It's over. If there are only two people left alive in this parish—using that as a comparison—two out of fifteen thousand. That's ...” He did some quick mental math. “Say, 125 people out of every million left alive in the world. Now the figure is probably higher than that, alive, I mean, but that's still pretty grim statistics.” And, he thought, what if this stuff has affected the minds of some—and, perhaps, their bodies? Mutants? Possible. Greatest story I could ever write and no one around to read it.

Shit!

“You're serious, Ben?” Big eyes wide. Pretty eyes.

“I consider death to be very serious, Fran.”

“Well ... exactly, what does this mean?”

“It means,” Ben said slowly, “that you're stuck with me, and I suppose I'm stuck with you.”

“Oh, Lord!” she said, then rolled her eyes and fainted.

Ben caught her just before she cracked her head on the blacktop.

“What a marvelous way to start a relationship,” he muttered.

She opened her blue eyes and looked at him as they rolled along the parish road. “Where are you taking me?”

“Where would you like to go, Miss Fran?”

She closed her eyes. “I don't know.”

“Then shut up and help me look until you decide. And open your eyes. Look for people—alive. There's got to be some in this parish.”

“All the wrong sort, I'm sure.”

You may be correct there, Ben thought. “Just look, baby, and keep your social comments to yourself.”

“What is that big ugly thing?”

Ben looked down to see if his fly was open.

“This!” She touched the Thompson.

“It's a submachine gun.”

She looked at Ben, looked at the SMG, rolled her eyes, then looked out the window, her side of the truck. She shook her head.

“It's real, Fran. I assure you of that.”

“I'm beginning to believe, Ben. Look. There's smoke coming from that house over there.” She pointed, saying it with about as much interest as if she were discussing the price of kumquats in the supermarket.

The day was cool, temperature in the low sixties. But not cool enough for a fire, Ben reckoned. He pulled into the drive and looked for dogs. None. “Stay in the truck,” he told Fran.

“I most certainly will not! And don't you dare order me about, Ben Raines.”

Ben nodded, wondering when she was going into shock. Probably, he guessed, when we drive through town and she sees all the bodies . . . with the birds and the dogs and the hogs eating on them.

“Then come with me,” he said. “No play on words intended.”

She opened the door.

“There might be fifteen guys in there, all ready to rape you.”

She closed the door and locked it.

Ben checked to see if he'd taken the keys out of the ignition. He had. It would be just like Fran to drive off and leave him.

He walked up the stone walkway and tapped on the door. He held the Thompson in his right hand. The door swung slowly open. Ben did not know the man, but had seen him in town a number of times. In his early sixties, the man appeared to be in good health.

“Afternoon,” Ben said, speaking through the screen door. “I'm Ben Raines.”

“The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” the man replied.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Armageddon. The battle has been fought. So sayeth the Lord.”

Although not a student of the Bible, Ben had read it. He asked, “Who won—Good or Evil?”

The question seemed to confuse the man. He stammered for a few seconds, then closed his mouth and shook his head.

“Do you realize what has happened?” Ben asked.

“Armageddon.”

Ben sighed and looked past the man into the living room of the home. A fire was raging in the fireplace and a woman was sitting in a chair. She was dead. Ben could smell her from the porch.

“Do you want to come with us?” Ben asked. “Can we help in any way?”

The man shut the door in Ben's face.

He walked back to the truck and unlocked the door. As they were driving away, Fran asked, “Who was that man?”

“I don't know.” Then he told her what he had seen.

“That's awful. What are you going to do about it?”

“Nothing.” Ben shook his head. “Nothing I can do. I'm not a psychiatrist. But I'd say the man has stepped over the line. Pushed over it by what happened. He may come back around; he may not.”

“That's a pretty cold-blooded attitude, Ben. That poor old man.”

“Those poor old people who died from exposure,” Ben countered.

She glared at him while Ben wondered if this was another side of her, or if she was merely acting for his benefit. “You keep harping on that, Ben Raines. What would you have had me do about them?—Not that it matters at this date.”

“Help them.” His reply was terse.

“I see,” she said. “Well ... I would have thought—from reading your books—not that I've read many of them, you understand—that you would be the last person in the world to advocate wealth redistribution. I thought you were a conservative.”

“I am a Conservative, Fran, in most of my thinking. But I just do not like to see innocent people suffer needlessly. Not when enormous wealth is—was—piled all around them. As for wealth redistribution ... it was coming, Fran. It would have been a reality before the end of the century.”

“My daddy said that was communism.”

“While he sat sipping his hundred-year-old cognac, admiring his antiques, in a house valued at about a million dollars—none of those things did he, personally, lift a finger to earn. I don't buy it, Fran. But it's all moot now, isn't it? We're all equal.”

She shuddered at the thought of being equal with everybody. How . . . unfair!

 

They drove for another few hours, but saw no signs of life in the parish. Ben pointed the nose of the truck toward Fran's mansion. She was unusually silent.

“I'm going to take you back to your home, Fran—you can pick up some clothes. Then we'll go to my place. Don't worry, you'll be safe.”

“All right,” she whispered.

Ben waited in the huge den of the home while Fran filled several suitcases. Ben had never seen such wealth in all his life. He chuckled, thinking, Hell of a lot of good it did them in the long run.

I guess, he mused, if I had all this, I'd fight to keep it, too. Or would I? he questioned. I've never even dreamed of living like this.

He had never dreamed that grandly. He had not been raised to dream of wallowing in great luxury.

He helped Fran with her luggage, then, back on the blacktop, she said, “What are we going to do, Ben?”

“First off, don't look at the bodies in that field just up ahead. There aren't as many as I thought, but enough.”

Naturally, she looked, and promptly got sick.

Ben stopped the truck and let her out to barf by the side of the road. He stood outside the truck, Thompson at the ready, on the lookout for dogs.

“I
hate
to be sick!” she said, wiping her mouth with the handkerchief Ben had offered.

“You'll get used to the bodies,” he said. “I remember in training, the first time I ever ate dog meat. I—”

She doubled over and began up-chucking again. She straightened up, wiped her mouth, tossed the handkerchief in the ditch, and said,
“Goddamn you!”

“Sorry,” Ben said, motioning her back in the truck. “And I mean that, Fran. Fran?” She looked at him. “You've got urp on your sleeve.”

She nodded, brushed at the urp, then waved her hand forward, like a scout with a wagon train.

“Head 'em up and move 'em out,” Ben muttered.

“I beg your pardon?”

“How old are you, Fran?”

“Twenty-eight.”

“You probably wouldn't remember that TV show, then.”

“I'm sure it was violent and ugly.”

Ben sighed.

She was silent until they had driven through the small town with the odor of death hanging over it. Then she said, “Let's be honest with each other, Ben. I don't like you, and I probably will never like you very much.”

“Agreed.”

“But we're stuck with each other.”

“How true.”

“All right, then. For however long we are forced to keep company with each other—and I assure you, it will not be long—let's try to be civil, if not friends.”

Ben grinned. “O.K., Fran.”

“I don't like to cook; won't cook. I hate any type of housework, refuse to pick up after myself, and I whine when I don't get my way.”

Ben laughed at her honesty. “Do you do windows?”

She laughed for the first time that day. “No! But”—she looked at him, appraising him through frankly sexual eyes—“I don't like to sleep alone.”

“That's a fair trade-off, I suppose,” Ben said.

 

Fran didn't drink; gave her hives, she said. So Ben stayed sober that night. The first time in years, other than when he was sick or visiting his parents, he went to bed completely sober, and was glad he did.

Fran came to him, in his bed, smelling of subtle perfume and naked, her dark hair fanning the pillow beside him. As his hands found her, stroking her, and his lips worked at her breasts, she moaned and found him, working his penis into hardness. She straddled him, guiding him into her wetness, taking him with one hard, hunching motion. And from that moment on, for a half-hour, Fran had been, as one good ol' boy had described his events of the night before to a group of buddies, “a frantic fuck.” She might not be worth a damn for anything else, Ben reflected, but she knew what she wanted when it came to sex; how she wanted it, and how to get the most out of what was stuck in her.

Ben left her sleeping to stand by the window in the den, gazing out at the darkness. He knew the full impact of what had happened had not yet come home to him—not in its awful entirety ... its horrible finality.

Certainly, it had not struck home with Fran. Out of one hundred percent total, she maybe, at the most, was admitting to herself ten percent of the appalling facts surrounding her.

Ben suddenly made up his mind: there was no point in staying here. He wanted to see what had happened around the nation. He wanted to ... bury (the word had finally become acceptable in his mind) his parents, brothers, and sisters. If he could find them.

And, as a writer, he was a naturally curious sort of person. He wished he could see years into the future, see just what would be built out of all this tragedy. Out of the ashes.

Something far better than what we had just destroyed, he hoped.

He went back into the bedroom and slipped quietly into bed. Fran snuggled close to him, murmuring softly, something inaudible.

Despite his feeling toward her, Ben felt a soft prodding of sorrow for the young woman. Her type of person had always bought her way through the world. Now ... what would happen to people like that? Ben knew most of them were not survivors.

He took her into his arms, her nakedness warm against him, and despite the excitement building in him as he awaited the dawning, finally drifted off into sleep.

 

“I still don't understand why we have to leave.” Fran pouted, looking back at Ben's house as they pulled out.

“Aren't you curious, Fran? Aren't you the least bit curious to see what has happened?”

“I just wish everything would go back to what it used to be. The way it was.”

The rich getting richer and the poor contemplating armed revolution, Ben thought. “It might be that way again, Fran. But it's going to take years.”

“I don't want to talk about it,” she said.

“I'll think about that tomorrow.” Ben grinned.

She turned her head away and looked out the window.

Ben drove back into town and stopped at the sheriffs office, picking up another gas mask. He had a hunch they would need masks along the way.

They drove over the Mississippi River bridge at Natchez, with Ben having to stop three times to move vehicles. It was then the gas mask came in handy, for the occupants of the stalled cars and trucks were in bad shape, having been sealed up inside the vehicles, practically airtight. He made up his mind that when he got into Natchez, he would change vehicles, get one with a winch on the front and heavy-duty springs, for there was some other gear he wanted to pick up along the way.

At a dealership, Ben walked around the trucks, finally selecting a demonstrator that had all the equipment he needed, including a CB radio.

“I still don't see why we can't pick up a Cadillac or Lincoln,” Fran bitched, as she helped transfer the gear. “Then we could travel in some degree of comfort instead of bouncing along in a stupid pickup truck like a couple of gypsies.”

Ben realized there was no point in trying to explain, so he kept his mouth shut.

The stench in Natchez was horrendous, and Ben, fearing disease, made Fran put on her gas mask. He drove quickly through the small city, heading east, where he would intersect with Interstate 55.

“This mask is hot!” Fran griped, her voice muffled.

Ben said nothing, but when she attempted to remove the mask before they were through the city, he let her. She quickly put it back on, her face pale as the odor hit her nostrils.

They saw no humans alive on the sixty-mile run to the interstate, just west of Brookhaven, but the carrion and dogs were having a feast.

“Just keep your eyes straight ahead,” Ben told her. That, he did not have to repeat twice. She closed her eyes and kept them closed.

Common sense told Ben to skirt Jackson, but his natural curiosity overwhelmed caution and he exited off the interstate and drove into downtown Jackson.

“Oh, God!” Fran cried, as she looked at the bodies littering the streets. “Ben, let's get
out
of here.”

“Wouldn't you like to drive up to the Metrocenter and do a little shopping, honey? Just think of all the nice items you could pick up—literally.”

Her glance told him what he could do with his suggestion.

As they were turning around, a bullet slammed through the top of the windshield and Fran screamed.

Man is not that far from the caves, not that far from fighting over turf, food, women, survival. And if that man has been a part of any rough branch of service, if he took his training seriously, and if he has the slightest hint of pugnacity in him, that man will quickly revert back to barbarism.