William Johnstone - Fire in the Ashes

She swung reluctant eyes toward the screen. A cattle prod touched the naked newsman on the thigh. His scream chilled her. He rolled on the floor as the prod touched his buttocks and his feet. His screaming was hideous.

“Stop it!” Sabra shouted.

The prod touched the man’s genitals. He ground his teeth together with such force several broke off.

“Goddamn you, Hartline!” Sabra rose from her chair. “Stop it!”

“You’ll cooperate with us?” he questioned.

“I said I would!”

“Anything I say?”

"Yes!"

“I have your son ready to perform for us. Would you like to see that?”

“God damn you!”

Hartline laughed. To the operator of the camera, “Start rolling it.” He unzipped his pants. “Come here, Sabra-baby. This one is for VP Lowry. And if you ever fail to obey an order; if you ever let any copy air without government approval… this tape gets shown—in its entirety—on the six o’clock news.”

“You goddamn lowlife miserable son of a bitch!” she cursed him.

Hartline smiled. “Strip, baby. Take it all off while facing the camera. Let’s give Lowry a really good show.”

Naked and embarrassed and trembling with anger, Sabra faced the mercenary.

He netted his penis. “Kneel down here, baby—on your knees. You know what to do. You probably sucked cocks gettin’ to where you are in the network, anyway.”

She took him as the camera recorded it all.

Hartline laughed. “It’s just so fucking easy when you know how. Just so easy. ”

“I wonder how many of us really took this thing seriously?” Dawn said, almost as if speaking to herself. “I mean, before it actually touched us?”

Sunday afternoon in the Great Smokies, a time for rest and napping and talking.

“What a strange thing to say,” a young woman from Baker Company said. “Didn’t you always?”

“No,” Dawn replied. “Hell, I was a member of the press—practically untouchable. None of us ever really took the censorship order seriously. But when I shot that cop in Richmond, my only thought was to get away. I had absolutely no idea of joining anything. It all had kind of a dreamlike quality to it until I saw and heard all those people beaten to death in Memphis.”

Dawn was one of the few who made it out of the safe house in Memphis. She had never talked about it.

“How bad was it?” one of Ben’s regular Rebels from the days of Tri-States asked.

It was quiet, very peaceful in the mountains. A light breeze rippled the leaves as summer, sensing the change, began its slow drifting into fall. Nature’s coloration was beginning its gradual change; a little gold had appeared among the green. When Dawn spoke, her voice was low-pitched, as if the memory itself was painful.

“I can remember a panel truck or van in Richmond,” she recalled vocally. “And I remember that my head hurt and I was bleeding and my hand and wrist were sore from firing that hand-cannon. I don’t remember much about the trip from Richmond to Memphis. I do recall someone saying Memphis was safe because it was a dead city. We stopped several times and there was always someone to change the bandage on my head.

“We made it to Memphis without any trouble. Any of you ever seen that city? God! Dead doesn’t do it justice. It’s eerie. Anyway, we were all kept in this huge mansion there; our testing period. We were drugged and hooked up to polygraph and PSE machines. We all passed the tests except for this one girl; she was a federal agent working undercover.”

Dawn paused in the act of remembrance. “What happened to her?” someone asked.

Dawn shrugged. “I guess someone killed her.”

They all waited for her to continue; waited in the stillness of waning summer.

“We had all passed our tests and were waiting to link up with another group before being sent here. Three of us were way in the back of the house—this was another house, not the mansion. We moved several times. We were playing cards. Gin rummy.

“We never dreamed there would be a contingent of Hartline’s men and agents in the city. But then we didn’t know they had broken some of the people they’d captured in Tennessee. About nine o’clock that night they kicked in the front door and started hammering on people. Just like that—no warning, no nothing. It was… unreal. The guy who was playing cards with us pushed me and this other girl into a closet and up into the crawlspace of the attic. Then he dropped back down to search for a weapon. The two of us lay there, listening and shaking we both were so badly frightened.”

One Rebel paused in the lighting of a cigarette; another looked at the ground. No one said anything. All waited.

“The agents had knowledge that only a few of us would be armed. They killed them first, then started beating the men to death with nightsticks. They had other plans for the women,” she said grimly. “One girl kept screaming: ‘Help me—help me. God, it hurts!’ Over and over. I don’t have to tell you what the men were doing to her. It was a pretty grim scene.

“They… tortured some of the women right in the room under us. I kept thinking: this is not happening. This is America. This can’t be happening. Bullshit. It was happening, all right.

“And they were taking pictures of it, still shots and rolling action. Some of the men were laughing and saying how much fun it was going to be to compare this to some of the other films other guys had taken. Jesus Christ. Did the Nazis do things like that? I’m sure they did.

“All we could do was lie as still as possible and pray—if there is a God,” she added bitterly. “And I don’t know anymore.

“It seemed like it went on for hours. Hell, it did go on for hours! Then we heard the men leave. We waited for an hour before we slipped down into the… carnage. It was unbelievable—what had been done to the people. It was something you’d see in some sort of… sex perversion movie. Really. I’m not going to get into that. But these guys—Hartline’s men and some of these agents—they must be crazy; all twisted inside. I don’t know.” She shook her head.

“The next day, some trucks came to get us. We all took different routes getting here. I was in the small convoy that wasn’t ambushed. I don’t know if I could have taken that; I was pretty shaky. We got here that night.”

She lapsed into a silence that was loud. Just when it seemed she would not speak of the horror again, she added, “That’s when I got involved. That’s when I got involved.”

No one had anything to add to that.

“This is it?” President Addison asked, looking around him at the handful of men and women gathered at the presidential retreat. “This is all?”

“I’m afraid so, Aston,” Senator Carson said glumly. “All that I know for certain we can trust, that is.”

Fourteen men and five women making up the group of twelve representatives and seven senators.

“It’s worse than I thought,” the president said, his voice no more than a shocked whisper. “I was sure Matt would be among the group.”

“They got to Matt,” Representative Jean Purcell said.

“They?” Aston questioned.

“Cody and Hartline,” Senator Stayton said. “We didn’t learn of this until just a week or so ago, Aston. We just could not understand how responsible men and women could change overnight. Oh, we knew many of our colleagues were the wrong people for the job, but their people elected them… nothing we could do about that. But we thought we had enough votes to keep you in power. Then we started polling. Quite a surprise.”

“Yes,” Representative Linda Benning spoke. “More like a shock to us. Then we found out why. To make it brief, Mr. President, Matt was set up… a young girl, a very young girl. Naturally, it was Hartline and Cody. Everything was filmed.”