Chapter Fourteen

Ben froze, watching as Jersey closed her eyes and move her lips in silent prayer.

Five seconds took ten minutes to tick by.

“It’s a dud, Jersey,” Ben called. “Throw yourself away from it as far as you can.”

“I’m too scared to move, General.”

“Do it, Jersey. Now!”

She hurled herself from the grenade, rolling on the floor, and Cooper grabbed her, pulling her away.

“Leave it alone, General!” Dan’s voice came sharp from the doorway. “Just stay right where you are.” He walked to the grenade, picked it up, and threw it out a window. It bounced off a building, hit the alleyway, and blew. “Sometimes they do that,” the Englishman said. “Unpredictable little buggers.”

Ben got up and walked over to Jersey, putting his arms around her, holding her close. She was still trembling. “What can I say, Jersey?”

She pulled back and grinned up at him. “Well, sir, you could give me a raise.”

And amid the sounds of the battle raging outside, laughter rolled from the ground floor.

From Ike’s position on the west side of west Los Angeles, to the mercenary’s position on the east side of the combat area, the Rebels no longer felt they were trapped, even though they were, in a manner of speaking.

The street punks and the creepies had not only been thrown back, they had suffered terrible casualties during the failed assault. The dead were scooped up and placed in buildings, then the buildings set on fire.

The Rebels resumed their slow, block-by-block taking of the last major bastion of lawlessness and cannibalism and slavery in the lower forty-eight.

Ike and his people were clearing and burning the west side of West Los Angeles, pushing up to the San Diego Freeway and driving hard and

relentlessly toward L.a. proper.

Therm, Ben, and Cecil began slowly pushing the punks and the creepies who fought with them south, while Georgi and West linked up and began their slow advance toward the sea. The Rebels who had been on Santa Catalina Island were now, at Ben’s orders, linked up with West.

Four long and bloody days after the failed assault by the street punks, Ben told his people to stand down for twenty-four hours and catch their breaths.

While to the uninitiated it might seem premature, Ben knew his Rebels now had the upper hand and were going to win this fight. The street punks had thrown everything they had at the Rebels, and the Rebels had held and were now once more advancing. The fight was a long way from being over.

Weeks of bloody work still lay ahead of the Rebels. But the street punks were going to lose.

Ben suspected that even they knew it.

Ben had relaxed the rules concerning prisoners, and had allowed his people to take alive those punks who had come staggering and weeping out of the burning and smoking rubble of war. They were transported north, into the forests and canyons north of the city, and were guarded by the Woods Children. As slaves and prisoners were liberated by the Rebels, trials were held. Any punk who was identified as having killed in cold blood, raped, or tortured was put to death.

Ben had heard horror stories coming out of what was called the zone, and wanted a meeting of his commanders.

He had some news for them.

Ike jumped straight out of his chair, yelling.

“You’re gonna do what? Goddamnit, Ben, that’s the dumbest damn thing I ever heard you propose.”

Ben sat calmly. He had anticipated the uproar and was ready for it.

“I absolutely forbid it,” Cecil said, shaking his head. “No. No. Under no circumstances, no!

Reckless on your part and just too dangerous.”

The mercenary, West, said, “General, I believe that would be very irresponsible on your part. I’m against it.”

Therm said nothing because nothing Ben Raines ever did surprised him.

“Stupid!” Doctor Chase said. “Just plain stupid.

But I’m not surprised that you’d come up with something this half-cocked.”

“I might go along with it only if I could accompany you,” Dan said.

“You’ll be in command of my section here,” Ben told him. “And Cecil will be in command overall.”

The yelling started anew.

Ben poured another cup of coffee, petted Smoot, who was laying on the desk, and waited it out.

“Ridiculous!” General Georgi Striganov snorted his disapproval. “If anyone at all goes, it should be me.”

“I’ll take two companies, a complement of armor, and Buddy and his Rat Team. We’ll pull out in twenty-four hours.”

“You will, by God, take a platoon of my Scouts!” Dan stood up. “And that is something I insist upon, General.”

Ben knew to argue with the Englishmen, who was as hardheaded as Ben was, would be futile. He nodded his head in agreement. “All right, Dan. Fine.”

Ben was going out into the foreboding and mysterious area called the zone.

“I’ll put together a medical team for you,” Chase said, knowing the brief argument was over. Once Ben made up his mind, there was no turning him around.

“Well, shit!” Ike said, disgust in his voice.

“I’ll order flyovers to start immediately.”

Ben nixed that. “Keep the planes on the ground,”

he said, scratching Smoot behind the ears. The husky rolled over on her back and

grumbled in contentment. “We don’t know whether or not the warlords out there have rockets capable of bringing a plane down. Let’s don’t risk it.”

“Ben,” Georgi said, trying one more time. “I wish you would reconsider. That area called the zone is hundreds and hundreds of square miles of hostile territory. None of us really knows what is out there.”

“That’s why I’m going,” Ben replied. “To find out. We do know that there are slave and breeding farms out there, and I’m going to put a stop to them. It’s something that will have to be done at some point in this campaign, so let’s get it done now. Dan will take over for me here. Cecil is Forces Commander. That’s it, people.”

The unit commanders filed out, to a person bitching and grumbling and cussing, but all knowing there was no point in arguing further with Ben.

Ben smiled at Linda. “Well, how about it?

Ready for a little adventure?”

She returned the smile. “Oh, sure, Ben. I mean, it’s been so damned dull around here.”

Ben walked the line, inspecting his command just moments before pullout. Five main battle tanks, five Dusters, five M113’s, five

LAV-25 Piranhas. A line of tankers and supply trucks. Two full companies of Rebels, a platoon of Dan’s Scouts, and Buddy’s Rat Team.

It was a lot more personnel and equipment than Ben wanted to take with him, but it was better than having to put up with several days of argument from the others. And Ben also knew that his days of just taking off and lone-wolfing it were gone. Too many people depended on him; he had too many decisions to make. This was about the closest that he was going to come to being a lone wolf in search of action.

“The first good-sized town we come to,” Ben told Dan, “I’ll secure an airstrip for supply planes. Providing there are no surface-to-air missiles out there. I have a hunch we’re going to be taking a lot of people out of the zone. And they are not going to be in very good shape.”

“You know that I should be leading this expedition,” Dan said, trying one more time.

Ben smiled and ignored the statement. “Keep the home fires burning and the feet of the punks in the flames, Dan. I’ll be in radio

contact. Good luck.”

“Good luck to you, sir.”

“Mount up!” Ben yelled. “Let’s go.”

The column headed north, driving through all the still-smoking devastation they had earlier wrought. They cut east until they found a winding two-lane highway that ran through the San Gabriel Mountains.

The Rebels bivouacked that evening in the mountains, and were all both pleased and somewhat spiritually moved at the serenity of their surroundings, untouched by all the hideousness and suffering that lay only a few miles to the south.

At dawn, they were rolling eastward, and soon picked up Interstate 40.

“How far do we take it, General?” Cooper asked.

“All the way to Needles, Coop. We’ll stop at every town and look it over. Beth, did the vehicles’ water tanker fill up last night at that stream?”

“Yes, sir. Filled to capacity.”

“That’s good. Because it’s about to get dry up ahead.”

Bone dry. “Like in a desert,” was Jersey’s comment about the country they were passing through.

Barstow had been destroyed. Little remained of it except for burned-out buildings, and the walls of those structures were pockmarked with old bullet scars.

Barstow had been a thriving community of nearly twenty thousand. Now there were no signs of life.

“Hell of a battle fought here,” Cooper remarked.

“Several years ago, I’d say.”

The convoy had stopped in the center of the burned-out town. “Scouts out,” Ben ordered. “Look it over.”

No signs of human habitation, they reported back.

The convoy rolled on.

There was nothing left worth salvaging in the tiny towns that had once existed alongside the Interstate. They had all been destroyed and picked over countless times. Carrion birds and rats had picked the human skeletons clean of flesh, leaving the bones to bleach in the sun and be eventually scattered by the desert winds. The Rebels inspected the towns and then rolled on. They made a very dry camp at the southern edge of the Bristol Mountains. Since leaving the northern edge of the sprawling city of L.a., none of them had seen any sign of a living human being. They had seen the fleeting shapes of coyotes darting, seen tracks of wolves once more returning to their rightful place in the scheme of things, and had heard the screams of pumas at night. But no signs of humans.

“It’s eerie,” Linda said over a second cup of coffee as they all sat around a campfire. “It’s like we were suddenly transported to a new world, void of life.”

“And technically,” Buddy said, warming his hands over the fire, for the nights were cool, “we’re not even in what is referred to as the zone.”

“I believe that this is called a no-man’s-land,”

Ben said. “And I can certainly see why.”

“Tomorrow, Father?” Buddy asked.

“We’ll have us a look at Needles, and then cut south, on Highway 95. We’ll take that down to Blythe, and from there we’ll head on down to Yuma.

From Yuma to Calexico. There, we’ll have to figure out a route.”

“Do we have any intelligence on what we might find there?” a Rebel asked.

“Only what some prisoners have told us, and how much of that we can believe is up for grabs,” Ben said.

“Outlaws, punks, thugs, drifters,

slavers, murderers, human crud of the worst sort. If you can hang a name on the dregs of society, you’ll find them where we’re going.”

“And we are going straight in, right, General?”

Beth asked.

“That’s right.” Ben smiled at her. “We’ll just call ourselves … ah, well,

missionaries.

Going on

our way spreading the good word.”

Buddy returned his father’s smile. “Are you going to give us bibles to pass out, Father?”

“You already have them, boy. They’re just in a slightly different form than the King James version.”

Buddy held up his old Thompson.

“That’s it, son. Yea, verily, and all that.

Amen.”

“Somebody drag them out of the road and burn the bodies,” Ben said, as he looked down at the dead outlaws who had tried to block their entrance into Needles. “Buddy, take a couple of tanks and a company and secure the town, please. We know they have prisoners in there, so try to take them alive. Corrie, get me Ike or Cecil on the horn.”

After a moment, Corrie said, “Cecil is out of pocket. Ike is on scramble.”

“Yo, Ben.” Ike’s voice came out of the speaker. The sounds of artillery booming in the background was strong. “What’s your twenty, Eagle?”

“Needles. The town’s got some crud in it and we believe they’re holding prisoners. We’ll take it and move on. How’s it going on your end?”

“Moving right along, Eagle. We’re advancing three or four blocks a day, pushing the punks and the creepies south. Ben, you might find yourself in a very bad position if you advance further west than Calexico.”

“I know. But I haven’t made up my mind what we’re going to do yet. We’ll secure the airstrip at Blythe and bump you from there. Eagle out.”

Ben handed the mike to Corrie and listened as a short battle raged within the shattered remains of the small town. Buddy returned, escorting a band of prisoners.

“I knew it!” a woman hollered, as she came within sight of Ben. “I done tol’ you and tol’ you it had to be him. I tol’ you we all ought to run.”

“Shut up,” a man said.

“Civilians?” Ben looked at Buddy.

“They killed all the prisoners before we could get to them, Father,” his son told him. “They just lined them up and shot them.”

“Why would they do that?” Linda asked.

“To keep them from talking, telling us all the horrors these crud have put them through.” Ben faced the man who had told the women to shut up. “You comwhat can we expect in Blythe?”

The man spat on the ground. “Screw you, asshole!”

Ben butt-stroked him with the M-14, knocking the outlaw to the ground. Ben placed the muzzle of the rifle against the man’s forehead. “I am accustomed to having my questions answered in a civil manner, punk. Now do so.”

The outlaw with the busted and bloody mouth spat out broken teeth and lay on the ground, looking up at Ben. Fear crept into his eyes. He had known for years that Ben Raines and the Rebels would someday come; had known for years that he should change his ways and stop his career of lawlessness. And now he knew it was too late. His guts knotted in fear as he realized that death lay laughing at him just around a dark corner.

“I’ll be good,” he mumbled. “I promise that I’ll be good. I swear it!”

The hard eyes of Ben did not change. Contempt for the outlaw touched his face briefly. “You’ll be good only as long as the Rebels stay around. So let’s don’t kid each other. You can live three more minutes, or you can die right now. It’s up to you.

What’s in Blythe?”

The outlaw was shaking in fright. He used to think it funny when his prisoners trembled in fear, crying and begging for their lives. Now he could not find a single amusing thing about it as he pissed his dirty underwear.

“You don’t strike a very good deal a-tall, General.”

“I don’t make deals with punks,” Ben told him. “It’s not a good practice. Speak your piece.”

“Fuck you!”

Ben shot him. He walked over to another man. The man dropped to his knees and began praying. He prayed for forgiveness for all the women he’d raped and sodomized. The men he’d tortured and enslaved.

The children he’d sexually abused. Jersey listened to him and spat on the ground.

“What’s in Blythe?” Ben asked, when the punk paused to catch his breath.

“Texas Jim!” the man screamed, his spittle spraying Ben’s trousers. “Jesus God

Almighty! You ain’t got no right to do this. We human bein’s. I’ll admit we done wrong, but give us a break. I got constitutional rights, General. I want to see a judge. I want me a lawyer. I got rights under the Geneva Convention.

I got-was

A bullet.

The thugs and punks and outlaws and their women began crying and praying and begging.

Ben moved to another man. Put the muzzle of his M-14 on the man’s forehead. “The longer you talk, the longer you live.”

Linda understood it then — finally, why the lawless feared Ben Raines so. There was no give in the man. None. You obeyed the few laws that the Rebels laid down, or you lay down dead. He was flint-hard and uncompromising. And he was going to win. She knew in her mind that nothing was going to stop him. No woman would ever change him, no man would ever break him.

“Texas Jim is a warlord, General,” the outlaw told him, his voice numb with shock and fear.

“He’s got him a good-sized army down yonder.

“Bout two hundred and fifty tough ol” boys.

You know what I mean?”

“I certainly know the type. White trash and assorted other assholes who believe they are above any law. Go on.”

The outlaw thought about that as beads of sweat broke out on his forehead. “He be waitin’ for you, General.”

“You think maybe I should run back to my vehicle and hide my face in fear?” Ben asked.

“I reckon not,” the man said slowly. He turned his head to look at other Rebels, gathered around.

There was no pity on their faces. They were expressionless. A couple of them were eating rations out of cans. One was stretched out, catnapping in the shade of a big tanker. One woman was brushing her short hair.

“Yuma?” Ben asked.

“That would be Banniger and his bunch. About the same size as Texas Jim.”

“Calexico?”

“That, I don’t know. Things are subject to change from one week to another. That’s right on the edge of the zone, so gang leaders come and go. Last I heard they be nearabs a thousand or more toughs down yonder. You gonna let me live?”

“Give me one reason why I should.”

The outlaw hesitated, thinking so hard his eyes bugged out. He had killed and raped and assaulted and in general made life miserable for nearly everyone he had come in contact withfor years. He tried to think of some decent act he had done. He could not. He recalled the time he’d been with that bunch when they’d attacked a nearby Indian reservation and killed all the men and raped the women and young girls comanda few boys too. Just to hear them holler and squall.

He swallowed hard. “You cain’t just line us up and shoot us, General. That wouldn’t be right.”

“Isn’t that what you people just did with your prisoners?”

“Well … yeah. But you “posed to show us mercy.

That’s the way it’s ‘posed to work. I mean, after all, I was an abused child.”

The Rebels had piled the bodies in a building and then set it on fire. Smoke from the burning town was in their rearview mirrors as they pulled out.

Linda was silent as the long miles rolled by.

Finally, Ben said, “Say what’s on your mind, Linda.”

“The begging of those people back there, Ben, just before they were shot.”

“What about it?”

“Doesn’t it bother you?”

“Not anymore. It used to,” Ben admitted.

“But then I have always known that people have a choice of several roads to follow. Nobody forces them to travel any of life’s choices. Anytime you have to put a gun to someone’s head, to force a promise from them to obey even the simplest of rules, you are dealing with a loser, a liar, and a punk. Our way is very simple, Linda, with no complex legal mumbo jumbo. The Rebel road is wide and free. Be whatever you want to be as long as you obey the few laws we enforce. The other roads are rough and rocky, and violent death at the hands of Rebels is all that’s waiting at the end of those narrow paths.

And those who choose the lawless routes know it. They always have, Linda. No matter what lawyers and judges and social workers and psychiatrists used to say, the lawless knew what they were doing. And they did it because they had nothing but contempt for those of us who chose to obey the law. I have nothing but loathing for them.

“My God, Linda, we’re living in the

simplest of times since humankind crawled out of the caves. All one has to do is find an abandoned house and start anew. All one has to do is flag down a Rebel patrol and say, I want to join you. It doesn’t make any difference what one was before the Great War. We don’t care. We don’t look back. Now and the future are all we’re concerned with. If you can’t live with that, Linda, go on back to your peaceful little valley-what’s left of it-and see how long

you can survive without us.”

She was silent for another few miles. “No, I’ll stick it out, Ben. Just give me a little time.” She smiled. “You see, I was one of those opposed to the death penalty back when the world was whole, so to speak.”

“We have a number of them within our ranks, Linda.

But they saw the light, and I suspect so have you, or you wouldn’t be here.”

“The callousness of it all is still a little mind-numbing. We used to see it in the movies, but we knew it wasn’t real. They were actors, and they’d get up and walk off once the scene was shot.

But I’ll pull my weight while I’m getting accustomed to the Rebel way.”

“You certainly have so far, and I have no reason to doubt your ability to do so in the future. Sure, it’s mind-numbing, Linda. Unlike the movies or on the pages of a book, here you smell the urine and the excrement after the bullets strike, and sometimes before they do. Few people can face death as calmly as they believe they can.”

“So I have discovered,” she said, a dryness to her words. “No, Ben, I’m with the Rebels all the way. I’ll stick it out.”

“Good” Ben said, a pleased note in his words.

“You’ll make it, Linda. Part of your mind is still operating on yesterday’s premise that we have courts and halfway houses and all the trimmings that go with civilization. But we don’t. What you really haven’t grasped is that all that stands between anarchy and order is a very thin line of men and women called the Rebels. But understand this, Linda. Once we clear the lower forty-eight,

the laws we’ll set in place will never be what they were back before the Great War. Not as long as I’m alive. Or Buddy or Tina or Ike or

Cecil or West or Georgi or Dan, or

any Rebel for that matter. We will never allow that to happen. Not again. In our society, right is clearly spelled out, as is wrong, and there is only dark water and quicksand between the two comno gray.

No legal jargon, no plea-bargaining, no defendant’s tearful pleading that it quote-unquote ‘won’t happen again and I’m so sorry I got drunk and killed those people.”

“It’s bullshit when people say they didn’t know they were drunk when they got behind the wheel of a car. They knew. They just didn’t care. So why should we care what happens to them? It was bullshit when a hunter killed another hunter by shooting him out of a tree and said he was so sorry but he thought it was a deer or a squirrel. What it was was an irresponsible act by an asshole with a gun. And it wasn’t the fault of the gun; someone has to be behind the trigger. It was bullshit then and it’s still bullshit when a criminal says that society drove him or her to kill and steal and assault and maim.

“The Rebels, Linda, all of us, would much rather be back in Alabama or Nebraska or Michigan or Louisiana or New Hampshire, farming or tending shop or raising cattle and hogs and watching our kids grow up or doing whatever is legal and moral. But we chose instead to fight to pull this country, and the world, out of the ashes of horror.

I’d like to go back to Base Camp One, take off my boots, hang up my guns, and write, Linda. And I’ll do it someday, God willing.

I’ll have my dogs at my feet and fingers on the keys of a typewriter, and my guns will be cleaned and oiled and in a gun case. And the front door will never be locked and I can leave the keys in my car or truck, and no one will have to worry about some perverted son of a bitch grabbing their kids or raping their wife. Because we don’t need those kinds of people, Linda. And whenever anything like that happens in Rebel-held territory, justice comes down swift but fair, and nearly always final.

“There is a line from an old World War Two song: “The White Cliffs of Dover.” It goes something like this: “There’ll be love and laughter, and peace ever after, when the world is free.” And we’re going to see that day, Linda. The Rebels — all of us. A year ago, I wouldn’t have said it. But now I believe that. Me and my kids and hopefully my grandkids, and that over-aged hippie Thermopolis, and the little con artist Emil Hite, and the Russian and the Englishman and the mercenary.

“We’re going to free the world from savagery and oppression and fear. We’re going to do it, Linda. We know how now. We’ve got it down to a fine art. The people with any degree of decency in them either join us actively, set up outposts, or agree to live in peace with all other living beings … and that includes animals. Those that won’t agree to those terms fight us and die. My grandkids, Linda, if I ever have any, are going to live free and without fear of thugs and punks and assholes. And if I have to die in a ditch somewhere insuring them that right, then so be it.”

A mile passed in silence. “Well, shit!”

Corrie said.

“What’s the matter with you?” Jersey asked.

“The best speech I ever heard the general make and the goddamn batteries went dead in my tape recorder!”

They all spent the next several miles laughing uproariously and wiping tears from their eyes.