William Johnstone - Fire in the Ashes

“Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama?” Cecil asked.

“And maybe the southern part of Arkansas, too. We’ll hash it out with the people when we get to Tri-States. I think we’ll have to stay there several months, at least. Let the plague run its course.”

“The people will go wherever you tell them to go, Ben,” Cecil said quietly.

“I’m not anyone’s king, Cec. And have no intention of becoming so. We’ll vote on it.”

The radio in Cecil’s truck barked. “The bridge at Fort Madison is plugged up tight, General. We’re taking a secondary road down to Hamilton. Thirty-forty minutes at the most.”

“Ten-four,” Cecil acknowledged the message. “Standing by.”

Forty-five minutes stretched into a hour. The sky grew leaden and began spitting snow. Ben tried to reach the scouts. No reply. He waited for a half hour, then turned to Cecil.

“I’m taking a patrol,” Ben said. “I’ll call in every fifteen minutes. Anything happens, you’re it.”

“Ben…”

“No. It’s my show. Maybe the radio conked out. Could be a lot of things. I’ll be in touch.”

Back in his pickup Ben looked at Rosita. “Out,” he told her.

She stuck out her chin and refused to leave.

“Do I have to toss you out bodily?”

“That’s going to look funny,” she calmly replied.

Ben closed the door and put the truck in gear. He would lead the small patrol. “Your ass,” he told her.

She smiled and said something in Spanish that sounded suspiciously vulgar. He hid his smile and pulled away from the main column.

“Check your watch,” he told Rosita.

“Ten forty-five.”

“Call in every fifteen minutes. It’ll take us about forty-five minutes to an hour on these roads to get to Fort Madison. That was their last transmission point. Whatever happened happened between there and Hamilton. You’ve got the maps. What highway do we take?”

“Take 96 out of Niota.”

At Nauvoo they found the pickup truck parked in the middle of the highway. One door had been ripped off its hinges and flung to one side of the road.

“What the hell…?” Ben muttered.

Rosita’s face was pale under her olive complexion. She said nothing.

Ben parked a safe distance behind the pickup and, Thompson in hand, on full auto, he walked up to the truck. Thick blood lay in puddles in the highway.

“Jesus Christ!” one of his men muttered, looking into a ditch. “General!”

Ben walked to the man’s side. The torn and mangled body of the driver lay sprawled in a ditch. One arm had been ripped from its socket. The belly had been torn open, entrails scattered about.

“Over here!” a Rebel called, pointing at an open field.

The second scout lay in a broken heap, on his stomach. He was headless. Puddles of blood spread all about him.

“Where’s his head?” a man asked.

“I don’t know,” Ben answered. “But we’d damn sure better keep ours. Heads up and alert. Combat positions. Weapons on full auto. Back to the trucks in twos. Center of the road and eyes searching. Move it.”

Back in the warm cab of the truck, Ben noticed Rosita looked very pale. He touched her hand. “Take it easy, little one,” he said. “We’ll make it.”

He called in to Cecil. “Cec? Backtrack to Roseville and take 67 down to Macomb. Turn west on 136. We’ll meet you between Carthage and Hamilton. Don’t stop for anything. Stay alert for trouble.”

“What kind of trouble, Ben?”

Ben hesitated for a few seconds. “Cec—I don’t know.”

“Ten-four.”

Ben honked his horn and pulled out, the other trucks following.

They saw nothing out of the ordinary as they drove down 96. But Hamilton looked as though it had been sacked by Tartars then followed up by hordes of Tasmanian devils.

“What the hell…?” Ben said, his eyes taking in the ruins of the town. Bits and scraps of clothing blew in the cold winds; torn pages of books and magazines flapped in the breeze. Not one glass storefront remained intact. They all looked as if they had been deliberately smashed by mobs of angry children.

There was no sense to any of it.

Ben said as much.

“Perhaps,” Rosita ventured, “those that did it do not possess sense as we know it?”

“What are you trying to say, Rosita?”

“I… don’t really know, Ben. And please don’t press me.”

“All right.”

Ben cut to the bridge and saw it was clear except for a few clumsily erected barricades. They looked as though they had been placed there by people without full use of their mental faculties.

Again, he said, as much aloud.

Rosita said nothing.

Ben radioed back to the main column. “Come on through to the bridge at Keokuk, Cec. But be careful.”

“I copy that. Ben? We just passed through a little town called Good Hope. It looked… what was it the kids used to call it? It looked like it had been trashed.”

“I know. Same with Hamilton. No sense to it.”

“We’ll be there as quickly as possible, Ben.”

“Ten-four.”

With guards on the bridge, east and west, Ben and the others cleared the bridge in a few minutes. Beneath them, the Mississippi River rolled and boiled and pounded its way south, the waters dark and angry-looking.

“They look like they hold secrets,” Rosita said, her eyes on the Big Muddy.

“I’m sure they do,” Ben put an arm around her shoulders, pulling her close.

They stood for a time, without speaking, content to be close and to look at the mighty flow of water.

“General?” one of his men called. “Look at this, sir, if you will.”

Ben and Rosita walked to where the man stood. Painted in white paint on the bridge floor, close to the railing, were these words:

It was unsigned.

“He was talking about the mutant rats,” Ben said. Rosita looked at him, eyes full of doubt. “I wonder what happened to the person who wrote this?” the man who discovered the message asked.

“He went over the side,” Rosita said.

“Probably,” Ben agreed.

No more was said of it until the column rolled onto the bridge. There, in the cold January winds, Ben told his people what had happened to the scouts.

Roanna stepped forward. “General? President? What the hell are you, now?”

Ben had to laugh at her reporter’s bluntness. “How about Ben?”

“I’ll keep it ‘General.’” She then told him of the AP messages and of her sending Jane to Michigan.

Ben was openly skeptical. “Mutant beings, Roanna? Are you serious?”

“Yes, I am. Same copy that told of mutant rats. Received the same night from AP.”

Ben shook his head in disbelief.

“It’s highly possible, Ben,” Cecil said, as the cold winds whipped around them. “I seem to recall hearing some doctor say after the initial wave of bombings that God alone would know what type of mutations the radiation would bring in animals and humans.”

When Ben finally spoke, his words were hard and firm. “Now I don’t want a lot of panic to come out of this. None of us know what happened to our scouts. They were killed. By what or whom, I don’t know. What I do know is this: we are going to make the Tri-States. Home, at least for a while. We’ve got rough country to travel, and we’ve been lucky so far. I expect some firefights before we get home. So all of us will stay alert.

“We’ll be traveling through some… wild country; country that has not been populated for more than a decade. It’s possible we’ll see some… things we aren’t… haven’t witnessed before. I hope not. But let’s be prepared for anything. When we do stop at motels, we’ll double the guards and stay alert. But I don’t want panic and talk of monsters. Let’s move out. We’ll stay on 196 all the way across northern Missouri.