Alone in the Ashes (11 page)

Ben and Jordy hit Highway 2810—if it could still be called a highway—an hour after first light. With any kind of luck at all, they would make Ruidosa before dark. Or, correcting that, the outskirts of the town, for Ben wanted to drive through towns during the day. At least during the day he could see what he was shooting at. And who was shooting at him.

They were traveling through desolate country, and the going had been slowed considerably by the trailer they were pulling. Damn thing wasn't tracking properly, wobbling and wriggling behind them. But at least it was still with them.

No sooner had that thought passed through Ben's mind than a tire blew on the trailer.

Thinking some extremely vulgar phrases, Ben changed the flat and silently prayed the old spare would hold until he reached a town and could search for another tire.

They reached Ruidosa with plenty of daylight left them; to his surprise, Ben located a tire in the looted, burned, and deserted little town that would fit the trailer.

Something about this part of Texas was jogging memories in Ben's mind, but as yet, he could not bring them to the fore. He knew it was something he'd found doing research years back, when he had made his living as a writer.

Then it came to him.

Near Redford, still many miles away, there was a huge private library. If he could just recall where it was. If he could bring the location to mind, he wanted to visit the place; hopefully, it had escaped looters. He knew that people who looted were not interested in literary flights of fancy; theirs was a much more baser regard.

Ben and Jordy made camp during the daylight hours just outside Ruidosa, ate dinner, and then moved on to a different location to camp for the night, halfway between Ruidosa and Indio. Ben had spotted no one, but the short hairs on the back of his neck were beginning to stand up—or so it seemed to Ben—like the hair on a dog's back upon sensing danger.

Ben would sleep lightly this night.

 

 

“Got about a platoon of Raines' Rebels bearing down hard south,” one of Campo's scouts reported in. “They're travelin' in a hell of a hurry.”

“How you know they're Rebels?” West asked.

“Tiger stripe,” the scout replied.

“Huh?”

“Raines' people wear tiger stripe,” Campo told the man. “Black berets.” He looked at his scout. “Leave them be,” he ordered. “Tanglin' with sixty of those people is like tanglin' with six hundred other folks. Fuckers are crazy. And they travel with enough mortars and artillery to cause a lot of trouble.”

Campo was quiet for a few moments, slurping at his coffee. Then he smiled.

West caught the smile in the light of the camp fire. “What is it?”

“Even short-range transmissions are gettin' pretty scratchy, right?”

“Yeah. So what?”

“Asshole! Think about it. If we can't get through on the radios, then neither can Raines or his people. They don't know where he is neither.”

West grinned, the light from the fire giving his face an evil cast. “Oh, I got it. Right.” He rose from his chair and hobbled off to his tent.

“He ain't the sharpest fellow I ever met, Jake,” a man said.

“Yeah. Did you guys round up any women?”

“Found a half a dozen.”

“Bring me the best-lookin' one. Then you pass the others around to the boys.”

And the screaming began in the outlaw camp. It would last all night long.

 

 

The night passed quietly and uneventfully for Ben and Jordy. At first light, Ben tried his radio. He could reach no one. The air was filled with static, overpowering all else.

And that left him with an uneasy feeling. Not for himself, but because of Jordy. Ben was not afraid of fighting one, or ten, or a hundred; he had been in so many fire-fights over the years since the collapse of the government, it was second nature to him. But he didn't want any harm to come to Jordy.

He pondered his options.

He could hunt a hole and stay down. But smoke from campfires would eventually be spotted by some sharp-eyed outlaw. And he didn't know how long this radio interference would continue.

He made up his mind.

“We're pulling out, Jordy. We'll take our chances on the road.”

 

 

Rani had reached the outskirts of Marathon and was desperately searching for a road that would bypass the town. She found an unpaved road leading off to the south and turned on it. After only a short distance, that road connected with the old scenic route. A few miles down that road, and she came to the bodies.

The naked men and women had been staked out on a flat rise. Wild dogs and coyotes were feasting on the cadavers. Using her binoculars, she viewed the ugliness. She could tell the bodies had not been dead for very long.

She reached for her CB mike, then pulled back her hand. Best to warn the kids in person, for even if she could send a clear transmission for no more than five hundred yards, someone else might be listening.

And they were getting too close to their destination to fail now.

She rolled down the window and waved the short convoy on past the hideousness. Leaving the dogs and coyotes to continue their feasting.

Overhead, lazily circling in the sky, ever patient, the carrion birds were waiting their turn at lunch.

Rani and the kids put some distance between the bodies and themselves.

 

 

Ben switched over to the scenic route, avoiding the town of Presidio. The going was slower than ever, now. The highway was choppy and littered with the rusting, broken frames of cars and trucks. And there was death in the air. It came to the nostrils of Ben and Jordy clear and pungent.

“Ben? ...”

“Death, Jordy,” Ben told the boy. “And that other smell is gunsmoke. Been a battle around here, and damn recently, too.”

“Between who?”

“I don't know. If I had to guess, it was between the good guys and the bad.”

“We're in trouble, aren't we, Ben?”

“Kind of, Jordy. But we'll get out of it.”

The boy shook his head. “I don't know. I dreamed about that old man again last night.”

Ben felt a chill in his guts. He knew, he
knew
what old man Jordy was speaking of. But he had to ask. “What old man, boy?”

“I seen this real old guy last year, Ben. God! He looked like he was maybe a hundred years old. Wore a robe and carried a big stick. Had a long beard. He pointed that stick at me and said, ‘Make good use of the time left you, boy.' Then when I looked up again, he was gone.”

Ben had seen the old man, too. Back in Little Rock.
⁵
He hadn't known what to make of him then, didn't know what to make of him now.

“What do you think that old fellow was trying to tell you, Jordy?”

The boy looked at Ben. His eyes were somber. “That I ain't gonna live to be very old.”

 

 

“Nothing?” Colonel Gray asked his radio operator.

“Nothing, sir. Nothing but a solid wall of static, and it's getting worse by the hour.”

Colonel Dan Gray's eyes were worried as he looked toward the west. “That belt of radioactivity above us is causing it. And it might continue for weeks. It might never clear up.”

The young Rebel looked up. “I hope that shit stays up there.”

Another Rebel said, “I hope it goes away. Will it, Colonel?”

“Yes,” Dan said. The Rebel's face brightened. “In about five hundred years.” The young Rebel looked stunned.

The convoy was on the interstate, just outside Meridian, Mississippi, waiting for scouts to report back. Radio contact was impossible.

“You're sure Nolan's last broadcast said the general was heading for West Texas?” Dan asked.

“Southwest Texas, sir,” the radio operator corrected. “I'll bet my life on it.”

“Or General Raines is betting his,” the Englishman said softly.

 

 

Rani and her kids called it a day about twenty-five miles inside the Big Bend National Park, with Croton Peak to their west, Sue Peaks to their east. The Tornillo lay to the north. If their luck held, they would be in Terlingua the following day.

Ben and Jordy pulled into Redford in the middle of the afternoon. The town was, to Ben's eyes, amazingly intact. For some reason, it had escaped the greedy, lawless hands of looters, those shiftless, lazy people who would rather steal than work—whether there is a working civilization or not.

Then the elusive memory became fresh in Ben's mind, and he drove up to the general store, got out, and entered the store. The front door had been broken in, but still swayed on one hinge.

First impressions had been incorrect. The store had been looted. But the hundreds of books in what had probably been the largest private lending library in the state were still on the shelves.

“So much for the mentality of looters,” Ben said.

He selected a dozen or so books. Several classics for him, some works of history and English, and, with a smile, a book on civics.

“Nothing like reviewing the past—that didn't work,” he said.

“What didn't work, Ben?” Jordy asked.

“Democracy, socialism, communism—none of it. Those were forms of government, Jordy,” he added, seeing the confusion in the boy's eyes. “Here in the United States, we practiced a form of democracy. It didn't work, either.”

“Why, Ben?”

“That, Jordy, will be argued and debated in homes and caves and what-have-you for years to come.”

Man and boy went back outside into the light, and sat down on the front porch of the old general store.

“We were too ...” He started to say “diverse,” then bit the word off. Jordy would not understand and Ben wasn't sure diverse was the right word. “Jordy, I'm not sure I can even explain why it didn't work. Too many wanted too much from the central government—and they wanted it for nothing. For free. And there were a few who wanted to run everybody else's business. Oh, Jordy, it was a complex thing. People kept demanding more money for less work. Our personal way of life and living went up, while our moral values went down.” Ben laughed and looked at the boy, sitting on the steps, looking at him.

“Jordy, do you understand what I'm talking about?”

“No, sir.”

Ben laughed again and stood up. “Come on, Jordy. We'll put off discussing shoes and ships and sealing wax. Of cabbages and kings. And why the sea is boiling hot. And whether pigs have wings.”

The boy laughed and walked along beside the man. “You're funny, Ben.”

“A regular clown—that's me.”

“What's a clown, Ben?”

 

 

At midmorning, Rani and her kids reached the old mining town of Tres Lenguas—translated, it meant three tongues—the name had been shortened to Terlingua by an unknown party. With the exception of a caretaker, it had been a ghost town since about 1950. Once boasting a population of over two thousand people, the quicksilver mining boomtown had quietly died out.

For a number of years, however, on a Saturday in the fall of the year, as many as five thousand contestants, jokers, hecklers, and spectators had converged on “downtown Terlingua” for what they called the World's Championship Chili Cook-Off, a mostly unpredictable event. This yearly event had lasted as long as the nation was whole, and was one big party.

But now the silence was all that greeted Rani and the kids.

The hundreds of wooden shacks were long gone, crumbling into and once more joining the earth.

But the imposing mansion on the hill overlooking the once-bustling mining town still stood, as silent as the rusting equipment and memories that drifted through the ruins. There were dozens of open holes dotting the area; an old sign that held the ominous warning of dangerous, open shafts. The holes dropped for hundreds of feet—sure death for its victims.

Ordering the kids to stay in the vehicles, Rani made a walk-around inspection of the mansion and the land immediately around it. It was clear of holes. Then, rifle in hand, she inspected the home for outlaws and rattlesnakes, something she considered to be of the same breed.

There was not a window remaining in the mansion, not even a shard of glass to denote there had once been any windows. But there was a fireplace in the rooms. And there was enough rotting wood in the old town to insure a comfortable blaze against the chilly nights of winter.

She got the kids out of the vehicles and onto the brick-lined breezeway on the east side of the mansion. She ordered them to stay put, doing so with enough warning in her voice that she knew they would obey. They were good children, and Rani was all they had to cling to.

She dug into her supplies and found a hammer and long nails. With Robert's and Kathy's help, she nailed tarps over the windows in one huge room, then another. One room for the boys, one for the girls.

She had no broom, so she and the kids used rags to clean the rooms of dust and dirt. Then they tackled the upstairs. There would have to be a lookout up here at all times. The view was commanding, and she could see for miles.

She off-loaded the supplies from the trucks and hid them, then removed the distributor caps from the trucks, carefully storing them in the mansion. Then she and the kids took handfuls of sand and sprinkled the sand over the tracks left by the tires. Rani and Robert and Kathy spent the rest of the afternoon gathering wood and stacking it in one of the rooms of the mansion. Smoke was going to be a problem, she knew, but they had to have heat and something to cook over. She would have to chance it.