Out of the Ashes (9 page)

And football.

Ben cut his eyes to the ditch by the side of the road and his thoughts were abruptly returned to the present. He jammed on the brakes, sliding to a halt.

That was a body in the ditch.

He got out of his truck and, stepping over the water (when had it rained?), walked to the ditch and knelt by the man. The man had been dead at least a week; his corpse was blackened and stinking.

He walked back to his truck and flipped on the CB radio. “Give me a Montgomery Parish Deputy or a state trooper.”

Nothing.

He repeated his call and received the same scratchy emptiness from the speaker.

His CB was a good one and he had had it on ... a couple of days before the wasps hit him.

“Break-one-nine for a radio check,” he said.

Nothing.

He monitored all channels and received the same on all of them. Nothing.

He sat in his truck for a moment, reviewing what he could remember of the past week, before he was stung. He had been shopping, was it Wednesday or Thursday? Had he listened to a radio or TV since. No, not since the night he had gotten drunk listening to the TV newspeople flap their gums about nuclear war.

Ben looked around him, at the clear day, sunny and bright. Obviously, no nuclear war had occurred. He suddenly felt uneasy. Or, had it? When had he heard those horns honking so frantically? He shook his head. Kids, probably, cutting up.

He glanced at the body in the ditch and then at his watch. Almost noon. “Well, this is silly!” he said. “There is something wrong with my radio, that's all.”

Then he thought about the radio in his truck. He turned it on, tuning in to the local station first. Nothing.

He punched all the preset buttons. Nothing. He spun the dial left to right, then went slowly back.

Nothing.

A finger of something very close to fear touched him. He shook it off. But something deep within him, some ... sense of warning prompted him to punch open the glove compartment and take out the .38 special he always carried. Ben had blatantly ignored the government order to turn in all handguns, as, he suspected, had several million others. Ben despised Sen. Hilton Logan and everything he stood for. Logan was a dove—Ben was a hawk. Logan was a liberal—Ben was a conservative. A conservative in most of his thinking.

He checked the cylinder of the .38. All full. He shoved the pistol behind his belt and put the truck in gear. He had not recognized the dead man.

A mile further and he turned onto the road that was just inside the city limits. A half-mile further, on the edge of town, in an open field, Ben slowed to watch several large birds, vultures, rise from the ground at the sound of his truck. They flapped ponderously away. Full and heavy. Ben had only to glance quickly to see what they had been feeding upon: bodies.

This time it was fear that touched him—open, naked fear. “Did the balloon go up?” he asked aloud. “If so, why was I spared?”

He could not answer his question.

He drove on until he could drive no further. Two cars were blocking the street. Ben did not have to get out of his truck to see that the occupants' bodies were blackened and decomposing in death.

He backed up, turned around, and drove down a side street until he came to a residential area. He saw no signs of human life, but neither did he see any bodies. He wound his way to the service station and pulled into the drive. There, Ben sat in numb silence, staring at the windows of the Exxon station. The windows were smashed, broken; glass littered the drive. The body of his friend lay sprawled half in, half out of the door.

Ben got out of his truck slowly, not really believing all this was happening—had happened. He corrected his thinking. He knelt down beside the man. Mr. Harnack was stiff and black and stinking. Dogs had gnawed on him.

Ben stepped over the body and walked to the phone. He punched out the numbers of the police department, letting the phone ring twenty times. No answer. He called the sheriffs department. Same results.

Ben felt the butt of the .38, and the touch of the wood was reassuring.

He stood in the doorway and listened intently. He could not hear one human sound coming from the town.

He walked to the desk and turned on the small TV. He got the same results from every channel. And this was cable, coming from Chicago and Atlanta. Nothing from Chicago. Blank screen. The others had the civil defense emblem on the screen, but nothing to explain why.

Bold Strike. The words returned to him. Hunt a hole, partner. “I'm dreaming,” Ben said, his voice sounding strange amid the silence and the death. “What the hell happened? It has to be a dream.”

But he knew he was not dreaming.

He thought, this is nation wide—world-wide. Those thoughts chilled him, bringing beads of sweat to his forehead. “Jesus, am I the last man on earth?”

Then the words of that grizzled sergeant drifted back to Ben as he stood in the doorway, looking out at the mute gas pumps. “Survive is the name of this game, men. Fuck a bunch of candy-assed civilians. When the balloon goes up—and it will go up, believe that—most civilians won't make it, ‘cause they don't know their ass from peanut butter about stayin' alive. And what is so sickenin' is, they don't wanna know. They're content. They've got their pretty little houses, two cars in the garage, membership in the country club, and they think being tough means playing football. As far as they're concerned, everything is aces up. But they don't know the meaning of tough. They'll be the victims in any holocaust. But I'm gonna teach you men what tough is—mentally and physically. And when I'm through with you, you'll survive. If you men make it through the first wave, if you don't take one nose-on, most of you will survive.”

Ben nodded his head and instinctively moved from the door into the darkness of the station's work area. He squatted down, all his training returning to him.

The sergeant had said, “Maybe most of you won't make the military your life's work; sure, most of you will pull your hitch and get out. But that's no matter, ‘cause what you learn here in this school, and the other schools you go to; well,”—he smiled—“it'll stay with you. You made it this far, and that proves to me you want to learn the meaning of survival. So even if you get out, you'll push all this training way in the back of your minds—some of you will even try to forget it, 'cause it's nasty and dirty and dehumanizing. But you won't forget it, and if you ever need it, it'll be right there. Now, get on your goddamned feet and get ready to find out what you're really made of.”

Ben squatted in the shade of the garage area until his legs began to protest from the strain. When he rose, walking a bit to relieve the kinks in his leg muscles, he had reviewed what he had been taught ... years back.

And he knew one thing for certain: he was going to survive.

He pulled his truck up to the pumps and filled his tanks, topping off his reserve tank. He found four five-gallon gas cans and filled them, placing them in the bed of his truck. He looked back at Mr. Harnack, nodded his head, and drove off, heading for the police station, only a few blocks away.

The dispatcher was dead, not a mark on him. On the note pad on the table was scribbled: “I'm the last one alive. Getting weak. No help. Atomic bombs hit some cities. Some type of germ stuff got the rest of us. God have—”

He never got to finish the sentence.

“Atomic bombs?” Ben said aloud, his voice hollow and echoing in the room. “Germs?”

It really happened! he thought. I slept through a goddamned war!

“Maybe I'm lucky I did,” he muttered.

He started to pick up the mike to see if anyone would answer his call, then pulled his hand back.

“Yeah—somebody might answer it. But it might be somebody I don't want to see.”

He knew only too well that many times human scum survived when others more deserving did not. Ben looked around the small station house (why do they always smell like piss?), could find nothing he felt he could use, then drove to the sheriffs office.

It was a repeat of the police station. All dead. The office was a mess: gas masks scattered about; books on deadly gases and parish evacuation plans tossed on the floor. The bodies were stiff and blackened. And smelly.

Ben opened the windows and then prowled the office until he found what he was searching for: the gun room. He selected two .45-caliber pistols, checked them carefully, then found leather for them and extra clips. He calmly filled two extra clips for each pistol. He smashed the glass of a locked gun cabinet and picked up an old Thompson submachine gun. It was in almost mint condition; he had heard the sheriff was, or had been, a gun collector. He checked the SMG, found it in bad need of oiling, then prowled around until he found a can of oil. The bolt worked effortlessly when he had finished and the wood gleamed. He found a drum for the weapon and three clips, boxes of .45 ammunition, and a canvas clip pouch.

There was nothing he could do for the dead men, so Ben carried the gear outside to the fresh air, and sat on the steps. He filled the drum, then filled the clips, inserting a clip into the belly of the old 1921 Chicago piano, as the Thompson used to be called. This one was a modern-day version of the old weapon, but still more than thirty years old. It was a heavy weapon, and its effectiveness was limited. But up to one hundred yards, its knockdown power was awesome.

Ben walked to his truck and stuck the .38 back in the glove compartment. He belted one .45 around his waist. Again, he turned on the radio, slowly working the dial back and forth. Nothing. He drove to a sporting goods store.

A man and woman lay among the wreckage, dead. The store had been looted, but it had been done in haste, without much thought for real survival.

Ben spent an hour in the store, picking through the rubble, selecting what he felt he would need: all the forty-five ammunition he could find, which wasn't much, a portable stove, lantern, a sleeping bag, an ax, a good knife, a tent, a tarp, rope, two dozen other items. Then he drove to a local supermarket and set about picking up more items. The supermarket, like the sporting goods store, had been looted, but there, too, without much thought.

If everybody is dead, Ben thought, as he walked down the aisles, feeling just a bit foolish pushing a shopping cart, where are all the bodies? And if everybody is dead, who did the looting?

From the supermarket, he drove to a drug store. It had also been looted, but nothing of any real value taken. Drugs to make you high; drugs to make you low. False happy-time. Ben chose the healing drugs, then picked up bandages, iodine, tape.

Passing the cosmetic counter (he was amused to see it, too, had been looted), Ben paused as his reflection stared at him from a vanity mirror. He had never thought of himself as handsome, even as a teen-ager, his face had been more trustworthy than handsome. His hair was dark brown, peppered now with gray. His eyes were blue. He was just a shade over six-one—180 pounds. Even though he drank much more than he should, he was in good shape, exercising daily. He turned from his reflection.

He drove past several liquor stores and laughed at their condition: they were the worst looted of the stores. “Party time,” he said with no mirth in his voice. “Eat, drink, and be merry. For tomorrow we may die.”

He drove back to his house and unloaded his gear. I'm a looter, he thought. He built a small fire; then fixed a drink. He kept his mind clear of what he had seen that day, wisely not dwelling on it. Let the shock come gradually. At full dark, when he knew the big 50,000 watters kicked on, Ben spent an hour carefully searching the bands. Nothing. Tomorrow, he thought, I'll go back to town and find one of those world-wide radios. Somebody is out there.

And I've got to search the town for survivors.

He limited himself to only a few drinks, and fixed a good dinner. At nine, the strain of the day taking its toll, he went to bed. He was asleep in three minutes.

 

He had forgotten the phone!

Ben sat up in bed, cursing his stupidity. He glanced at the clock:
seven-thirty
. He looked at his wristwatch. Seven-thirty. Yesterday must have had more of an impact on him than he realized. Shock, maybe.

So the electricity was working, at least for a time. So, too, he reasoned, would be the phone system. For a while longer, at least.

He showered, shaved carefully, dressed, and fixed breakfast. He took his coffee outside and stood for a time, viewing the almost silent scene. Birds still sang, and that puzzled him. Somewhere a dog barked, and that puzzled him. Why a gas that would kill humans but not animals?

He looked back through the open front door. He was hesitant to begin the phoning, but it was something he knew he had to do.

He had to try to contact his parents, his brothers, his sisters. He walked back into the house. With a fresh cup of coffee in his hand, he began punching out the numbers for long distance. He called his parents first, then his oldest brother, up in Chicago, letting the phone ring twenty times at each number. No answer. Really, he wasn't expecting any. He went down the line, all the way to his youngest sister, in Cairo, Illinois. Nothing.

With a sigh, he replaced the phone in its cradle. He picked up his weapons and drove into town.

He went first to the local Radio Shack (it had not been looted), and picked out a huge world-wide receiver. He sat outside the store, on the curb, reading the material on the receiver; then turned on the big radio. It didn't work—no batteries.

“Wonderful, Ben,” he muttered. “Marvelous presence of mind.”

He found batteries for the radio and turned it on, spinning the dial slowly, working first one band, then another. Sweat broke out on his face as he heard a voice spring from the speakers.

The voice spoke in French for a time, then switched to German, finally to English. “We pieced together the whole story.” The voice spoke slowly. “Finally. Russian pilot told us this is what happened—from his side of the pond, that is. They—the Russians—had developed some sort of virus that would kill humans, but not harm animals or plant life or water. Did this about three years ago. Were going to use it against us this fall. Easy to figure why. Then they learned of the double cross. The Stealth-equipped sub. That shot their plans of an easy takeover all to hell. Everything became all confused. If we had tried to talk to them, or they with us, or the Chinese, maybe all this could have been prevented. Maybe not. Too late now. Some survivors world-wide. Have talked with some of them. Millions dead. Don't know how many. Over a billion, probably. Maybe more. Ham operators working. It's bad. God in heaven—it's bad.”

The message was repeated, over and over, in four languages.

“Goddamned tape recording!” Ben cursed. But he felt a little better. At least he knew what had happened. Sort of. But some of the message confused him: that part about “easy to figure why.”

A snarling brought him to his feet, the .45 in his hand. A pack of dogs stood a few yards from him, and they were not at all friendly.

Ben leaped for the hood of his truck just as a large German shepherd lunged for him, fangs bared. He scrambled for the roof of the cab as the dog leaped onto the hood. Ben shot it in the head, the force of the heavy slug slamming the animal backward.

The dogs remembered gunfire. They ran down the street, stopped on the corner, and turned around, snarling and barking at the man atop the cab of his truck. Ben emptied the .45 into the pack, knocking several of them spinning. The rest ran away. Ben slapped a fresh clip in the .45 and climbed down. Shaken, he stood for a moment waiting for the trembles to leave him. He looked around him, carefully.

“From now on, Ben,” he said aloud. “That Thompson becomes a part of you. Just like your arm.”

He picked up the radio and got in his truck. “All I need is rabies,” he said. “I live through a world-wide catastrophe and a fucking dog does me in.”

He held out his hands; they were calm. He knew he must search for survivors in the town, and he was not looking forward to that.

He began driving the streets of town, discovering the bodies. A great number of people had gathered at friends' homes; many houses contained fifteen or more dead. He went to his closest friend's house, steeling himself as he drove. His friend was dead, as were his wife and kids. It appeared Ben was alone in the town.

He drove back to the sheriff's office and picked up a gas mask. The day was warming, and he figured the smell could only worsen.

At a paper-vending machine, Ben picked up a paper, smiling as he automatically inserted the money into the machine. The paper was ten days old, about the time he had been stung. He stood for a time reading, then remembered the packs of dogs and walked quickly back to his truck.

There had been a news blackout, and the paper didn't tell him much. War was imminent; that was about it. He did not know how many cities were destroyed, or whether it had been done by nuclear warheads or germs. He tossed the paper into the littered street, then instinctively looked around to see if a cop had seen him do it.

He shook his head sadly and started the truck. He touched the Thompson on the seat beside him. He would search every street in Morriston, then head out into the parish. Someone was alive ... somewhere, and Ben intended to find that person.

 

But he could find no one alive in the town. And the dogs were getting vicious and much braver.

“A virus that kills humans, but not animals,” Ben mused. He hit the steering wheel with the palm of his hand. “Sure!” he said, ashamed of himself for his stupidity. The tape had said, “Easy to figure why.” And it was. Just walk right in and take over the country, void of humans, but with the livestock fat, healthy, and happy, munching away. An instant food source for the conquering army. But that army would have to move fast....

Ben smiled grimly as his writer's mind began humming.

Not if they moved from within.

He wondered how long the plan had been in the works? How many people—if his theory was correct, and he would probably never know—in this country had been recruited. Hundreds, at least—perhaps thousands. Paratroopers would be standing by, ready to go in, crush any pockets of resistance. With a crash course in agronomy, they could keep the livestock and the land in good shape until the farmers arrived. Which would not have taken long.

Instant victory with a minimum of bloodshed. For them.

But it backfired. Ben wondered how many double crosses were involved. He wondered if he would ever know, and decided he would not.

His mind began racing—what a tale this would have made.

“Bastards!” he said.

Then he saw her.

He braked the truck, stopped, and cursed.

Of all the people in the world the good Lord chose to save . . . why this bitch?

And he was not in the least ashamed of his thoughts.

Ben got out of the truck and gave her a mock bow, clicking his heels together, Prussian-style. “Why, good morning, Mrs. Piper,” he said acidly. “What a surprise seeing you. Not a pleasure, but a surprise, and I mean that sincerely.”

Even under the present circumstances, the look he received was one of intense dislike.

“Mr. Raines,” she said, with as much acid in her voice as there had been in his. “You're armed! I was under the assumption pistols had been outlawed some time ago.”

Fran Piper looked as though she had just that moment stepped from the pages of a fashion magazine: every dark hair in place, fashion jeans snugly outlining her charms—which were many. Fashion shirt—cowgirl, uptown-neat, all the snaps snapped.

“Yes, ma‘am. Pistols were outlawed some years ago—three, I believe. Thanks to Hilton Logan and his bunch of misguided liberals. But be that as it may, ma'am. Here I am, Ben Raines, at your service. That trashy Yankee writer of all those filthy violent fuck books, come to save your aristocratic ass from gettin' pronged by all the slobbering rednecks that must surely be prowlin' around the parish, just a-lustin' for a crack at you. Ma'am.”

“Raines,” she said, her eyes flashing, “you just
have
to be the most despicable human being I have ever had the misfortune to encounter. And if that was supposed to be Rhett Butler, you certainly missed the boat.”

“Paddle-wheel, I'm sure.” He smiled.

“Huh?”

“Never mind. Actually ...” Ben looked around him. No dogs in sight. “That was Claude Raines. He was my uncle.”