William Johnstone - Out of the Ashes

They had been dead for some time and were not a pretty sight for Ben to witness.

Ben walked through the house, touching a picture of the family taken years before, when life had been simpler. Suddenly, he whirled away from the scene and walked from the house, leaving his parents as he had found them. He carefully locked the front door and stood for a time, looking through the window at his parents. Through the dusty window, it appeared that his mother and father were sitting on the couch, discussing some point in the Bible. Ben preferred that scene. He walked from the porch, got into his truck, and drove away. He did not look back.

He spent the night on the outskirts of Mt. Vernon, fighting back depression that threatened to grow dark within him. Then, just before sleep took him, he felt a strong new resolve build within him…. What he was doing, this journey of his, was right and just; it had to be done. Ben wanted to discover why he was spared when so many others had died. Did the wasp stings have anything to do with it, or everything? Why had the deadly gases that had swept over the land killed some and not others? And he was right and correct in killing those who would prey on others less able to defend themselves.

Ben felt he was not alone in his one-man style of justice. He felt there were others like him throughout the country—the world. They, too, felt an outrage when witnessing the scum and slime who traveled the land, raping and killing and torturing at their leisure. Perhaps many who felt that outrage did not have automatic weapons and what was left of modern technology at their disposal; perhaps they were using clubs and stone axes, but they were his counterparts, nonetheless.

He stirred on the bed, shaking away his meandering philosophizing. Finally, he slept, dreaming of his parents and of an army of Rebels with no commander, no leader, no direction. He woke up tired.

His brother’s home in Mt. Vernon was burned to the foundation. He had no idea where else to look, so he drove away, his CB on. There were people alive in the town, but they ran away when Ben approached them.

He angled to the northwest until he picked up highway 127, staying with it, passing through a half-dozen small towns, stopping in each to look around, to make recorded notes. There were people alive in each place, but they appeared to be in some sort of shock, not knowing what to do. It appeared to Ben they seemed to be waiting for someone to tell them what to do. The smell of rotting human flesh was almost overpowering.

“Why don’t you clean up these dead bodies?” Ben asked them. “What are you going to do, just leave them to rot?”

“What business is it of yours?” he was asked.

Ben shrugged and drove away. “The hell with you,” he muttered.

He saw, he guessed, about a hundred people alive in Springfield, but they were not receptive to Ben’s questions. Most ran away when he approached them. He found one group that seemed to have some direction about them. They were not overly friendly, but neither were they openly hostile. Nine whites and three blacks; two women, ten men. He asked them a few questions, but the answers he received were of the monosyllable type.

“What are you people going to do?” he asked one of the women. She appeared to be the leader of the group.

She looked at him and walked away without replying.

End of interview.

Ben got the strong impression they all wished he would just leave.

Ben buried his second brother and his family in a common, shallow grave. Then, after working all afternoon, he realized how pointless it all was.

Millions, billions of people were dead all over the world, with no dignity in their dying. (Is there ever any dignity in dying?) Why should his family be any different? What the hell was the purpose of it all?

Ben threw the shovel on the grass and walked away as the cool fall winds blew across the yard. And that raised another issue in Ben’s mind: he did not want to be caught in the North during winter; winter was rough in Illinois even under the best of conditions. No, he would drive on to Normal, see about his sister, then on to the suburbs of Chicago to see about his brother, and then he would head for the deep South or the deserts of the West.

No—he shook his head—let’s take it, if we’re going to do it, all the way: over to the east as far as possible, then work down the east coast, all the way down to Florida. Slowly work your way back up during the last of the winter weeks, then head west. Let’s do it right, or not at all.

He found his sister—or what was left of her—in the back yard of her home in Normal. Dogs, or some kind of animal, had been feeding. Despite his earlier feelings, Ben could not leave her like that. He scraped a narrow grave in the back yard and then, gagging, moved his sister into the trench and covered that with earth and stones and concrete blocks.

Her husband he left in the house. In bed. Son of a bitch had probably been taking a nap while his wife mowed the yard. Ben wouldn’t have buried him even if he had been outside. Her husband was (or had been) a college professor at a local institution; a left-leaning type who got his nuts off just thinking about people like Hilton Logan, who wept every time a mass murderer was taken to the gas chamber or the barbecue chair. Ben despised him and the feeling was shared.

Ben drove on to the suburbs of Chicago, being very careful, all his senses working, for the chatter on the CB—on almost every channel—was picking up, and a lot of it was unfriendly. The hatred that Ben had sensed between the races had leaped to the surface after the catastrophe.

He heard a lot of “motherfuckers” and “honkies” on the CB, and a lot of what Ben called jive-talk. He also heard a lot of “nigger bastards, coons, shines, and porch monkeys.”

The hate had erupted.

Ben had no intention of driving into downtown Chicago.

There was very little actual fear behind that decision, but a great deal of common sense. Ben was not a racist, but he did not believe in giveaway programs that merely squandered money without solving any social ills. He was an advocate of forcing people to work, but only as a last resort. He had always felt that hard work, some conformity, and some bending was needed from both sides of the color line.

Of course, he thought, all that is moot, now.

He adjusted the volume of his recorder to catch all the hatred that sprang from the speaker of his CB.

He gathered that a race war was building between the blacks in the city and the whites in the suburbs. And he guessed, from listening to the chatter, that there must be fifteen or twenty thousand people alive in and around the city. So it was shaping up to be a hell of a battle.

What stupidity, Ben thought. We should all be working to build a wonderful new world from out of the ashes, all this misery. We should be putting past hates and distrust behind us, but instead, here we go again; nothing has changed.

Fools!

“The hell with you all!” Ben muttered. “Go ahead—kill each other. But you are going to regret you stayed in the city come this December, when the cold and snow hit.”

He encountered no trouble until he reached the town where his brother lived. The roads were blocked and armed white men patrolled the area. Ben had to smile at the sight. A sad smile. Back to the jungles, he thought.

“I’m trying to reach my brother, if he’s still alive,” Ben told a group of men. “Carl Raines.”

“I know him. He’s alive. What do you want with him?”

“Well, goddamn it!” Ben almost shouted the words. “He’s my brother. What the hell do you think I want with him?”

“Relax, mister,” the man said, softening his words with a faint smile. “Sure, you can go see him, but you’re not leaving once you get in.”