William Johnstone - Fire in the Ashes

“Bastard!” she screamed, tears of pain and rage glistening on her cheeks, the tears just ahead of a bright trail of crimson.

The cop, a burly, red-faced, 200-pounder, grinned at her through his plastic face-shield, raised his baton, and whacked her again. Dawn dropped flat on the street. The cop turned his back to her and watched the action at the other end of the street.

People were screaming, the air choking with gas. Dawn could barely hear the thud of billy clubs on bone and flesh and the snarl of police dogs as they bit through cloth and into flesh. No one paid the fallen blonde any attention.

She did not know how long she had lain in the street. But when she opened her eyes everything was hazy. She waited for her vision to clear. Shots were fired, someone yelled in a hoarse bellow of pain. Dawn turned her head and found herself looking at a nickel-plated pistol. It lay beside the still unmoving mass of the cop she’d booted in the nuts. She crawled a few inches closer to the gun. She could read the printing on the barrel. 357 magnum. The cop who had clubbed her the second time stood with his back to her, watching the fighting and screaming and running at the far end of the street.

Then he ran down the street, leaving her alone.

Dawn picked up the pistol, thinking how heavy it was. As an afterthought, she reached over the still-breathing federal cop and plucked out the bullets from his belt, putting those in her jacket pocket and buttoning the flap.

Unknowingly, Dawn Bellever had just taken the first step toward joining Ben Raines’s Rebels.

She knew absolutely nothing of guns. She crawled to her knees and hunkered in the street, the blood still dripping from her head. She reversed the pistol and peered down the barrel. Somebody, somewhere close, opened up with some type of automatic weapon, the narrow street reverberating with the boom of rapid fire. People were running all around her. She heard a woman screaming, looked to her right, and saw the second cop who’d hit her holding a young woman against a building. He was hitting her with his night stick.

“Well,” Dawn said stupidly, “I’m not going to tolerate that.”

Something was fuzzy in her head, fouling up her thinking. Dawn shook her head and raised the pistol. Again, she was looking down the barrel. She righted the weapon, gripped it with both hands, just like she’d seen cops do in the movies, took careful aim at the cop’s right leg, and pulled the trigger.

She blew half his head off.

The recoil knocked her flat on the street and numbed her hands. But she still gripped the magnum. She got to her knees and looked around her. The young woman the now-dead cop had been hammering on was running toward her, the officer’s weapon in her hand.

The girl’s face was bloody, her eyes burning with an intensity that Dawn recognized as near-fanaticism. She jerked Dawn to her feet. “That’s the same cop who raped me last week,” she said, pointing to the unconscious officer in the street. “I was one of ‘em who broke out of the tank.”

“Raped you!” Dawn said, not believing what the girl was saying.

The young woman’s eyes flicked to the PRESS badge on Dawn’s jacket. “You people don’t know where it’s at, do you? Yeah, raped. Come on, I’ll tell you about it. We gotta get out of here.”

They ran toward an alley and jumped into the back of a van. The driver roared off the instant the women were inside.

“Where are we going?” Dawn asked, a sick sensation in the pit of her stomach. She had killed a man. Worse, she had killed a federal cop. And she was known. Dawn’s face was very well known. As were other parts of her anatomy.

She had posed semi-nude for the new Penthouse twice.

The young woman wiped blood from her face. “Tennessee.” She looked at Dawn. “Hey, that was fine shooting. Where’d you learn to shoot like that?”

“I was aiming at his right leg,” Dawn said. Then her world began spinning and she passed out.

The woman wore a worried expression on her usually cheerful face. She entered Professor Mailer’s office without knocking, something she rarely did. Steve Mailer noticed her grim expression and smiled at his secretary.

She ignored the usually infectious grin from the boyish-looking professor of English Literature. “There are two men in the outer office,” she said. “They’re from the FBI. Or whatever that pack of rabble is currently called.”

“I am not a fan of the late Mr. Hoover,” Steve said. “Only from what I’ve read about him, I think perhaps the man is spinning in his grave at what his brainchild has become. I have been expecting the… gentlemen, Mrs. Rommey.” He stood up, a slender man, several inches under six feet. He could not get his weight above a hundred and thirty-five pounds. But he was wiry and tough and in excellent physical condition. He quickly wrote a number on a piece of paper and handed it to his secretary.

“I may be leaving in a few minutes,” he said. “Without them,” he cut his eyes to the closed door. “If that is the case, I want you to call the number on that piece of paper and tell whomever answers that class has been dismissed.”

She watched as he took a pistol from a desk drawer and held it by his right leg. “All right,” she said. “Steve, I remember you as a freshman; you were against any type of violence.”

Steve shrugged. “Times change. People grow up and hopefully become wiser. I think I have. Don’t ask me if I’m part of the Rebels, Mrs. Rommey—the men working for Al Cody are known for their expertise in torture.”

“Open this fuckin’ door!” a harsh voice rang from the outer office.

“Use the rear entrance,” Steve told her. “Now!”

She left, tears in her eyes.

“As Shakespeare said,” Steve muttered. “Though this be madness, yet there is method in it.” The professor smiled. “Come on in, motherfuckers!” he yelled. He cocked the pistol.

Just off the campus of the University of South Carolina, in a private home, Lynne Hoffman spoke before a small group of men and women. Their ages ranged from fifteen to sixty. Lynne was the head of her particular cell of nonviolent Rebels. Although they believed quite strongly in what the Rebels were attempting to do, their jobs were in gathering supplies and caching them. None of her people carried firearms.

All that was to change this night.

“We don’t have much time,” Lynne told the group. “One of those captured in the Virginia raid has broken, telling Cody’s men about us. We’ve got to run and we’ve got to fight. We…”

The front door slammed open and the small foyer filled with federal police and Hartline’s mercenaries. “You’re under arrest!” a man yelled. “Get your hands over your head and get up against the wall. Move, goddammit, move!”

Lynne jumped for the back door just as someone plunged the room into darkness. Gunfire rocked the night and someone began screaming in pain. Lynne and two others made it out of the house, running into the night.

“Burn the goddamn house down around them,” a man yelled.

Out in the desert, the night animals began their search for food. The hawk for a rabbit; the snake for a mouse; the mouse for a hole. But on this night, another type of hunt was underway. Mike Medlow, a federal police officer from Modesto searched for Judy Fowler.

Ever since he’d handled her lush little body during a campus demonstration, Medlow had tried every way he could think of to get the pants off her. Tonight, he’d followed her old VW into the desert and forced her off the road. The rest would soon be history.

“Come on, baby,” he called. “I know you’re part of the local cell of Raines’s Rebels. I’ve known for months. But I haven’t said anything about it, have I? That ought to be worth some pussy, huh? If I turn you in, Hartline’s boys will gang-bang you day and night. It’ll be our secret, Judy. Just you and me. Come on, baby?”