Punks.
Ben was dressed in tiger-stripe field clothes. His field pants bloused into jump boots. He had already stopped along the road and fixed a meager breakfast, boiling water to shave.
Even after a worldwide tragedy and a nation swarming with anarchy, the generation gap still holds true, Ben thought.
“Public road,” Ben said.
“Not no more,” the spokesman said. Ben pegged them all as in their late teens to early twenties. “We took over the road. Now you shut your mouth and pay up.”
“You want money?” Ben said with a smile. Money had been worthless for years.
“You a real smart-ass, ain’t you?” a pouty young woman popped off.
“At least my ass is clean,” Ben told her.
“Dads,” the tall young man said, reaching for a pistol on his belt, “you just bought yourself a world of hurt.”
“Kill “im, Tad!” the young woman cried. “Shoot his legs out from under him and let’s watch him flop around.”
“Yeah,” Tad smiled.
Ben dropped the muzzle of the Thompson, heavy in his hands with its full drum of .45-caliber ammunition, and pulled the trigger.
The quiet morning air was shattered by the hammering of the old Thompson and the screaming of the dead, dying, and badly wounded.
Ben knelt down beside the young woman who had wanted Tad to shoot Ben’s legs out from under him so she could watch him flop around.
The young woman had managed to pull a .38 out of her belt before Ben’s Thompson had very nearly cut her in half.
Despite the events that had prompted the shooting, Ben felt some small waves of pity wash over him. The young woman was really, under the grotesquely and amateurishly made-up face, a very pretty woman.
“It ain’t fair,” the young woman gasped. “Tad said he was the boss of this town and he’d take care of us.”
“What did you do with the people who refused to pay your toll?” Ben asked.
“Kilt ‘em,” the young woman groaned.
All feeling of sorrow for her left Ben.
She closed her eyes and lapsed into unconsciousness.
Tad screamed, his hands clutching his shot-up belly.
Ben walked back to his pickup and pulled out. “You goddamned cock-sucker!” Tad screamed after him. “My town! My road! Jimmy kilt Lucas for it and I kilt Jimmy. Mine!”
“You are certainly welcome to it,” Ben said. He rolled down the window and let the cold air fan him. “Should be quite an interesting trip,” he said aloud. “Certainly starting out with a bang.”
At an old truck stop just outside Nashville, Ben pulled off the interstate and into the parking lot, carefully maneuvering his way between rusted-out rigs and stripped cars. He tucked his truck between two rusting hulks that once were eighteen-wheelers, and walked toward what used to be the restaurant, his Thompson slung over his shoulder, the drum refilled.
He liked to stop at these old truck stops because sometimes he lucked out and could find, among the rubble, playable cassette tapes; he had left all his back in Georgia.
The first thing he spotted were two bodies, a man and a woman. The man had been tortured, then shot between the eyes. The woman had been raped, judging by the still-visible bruises on her inner thighs and the blood that had dried on her legs and buttocks. Like the man, she had been shot between the eyes.
Ben knelt down between the bodies. He touched them both. They were cold, but they had not been dead for very long. Bugs had not found them, and rats and dogs had not gnawed their flesh.
Ben walked the ruined and littered truck stop. There was not another living soul-that he could see. He stood and looked down at the man and woman. He had seen so many dead and rotting bodies that they had long since ceased filling him with any emotion. They were now merely a part of the way things were.
He walked out of the truck stop and to his pickup.
As he pulled back onto the car-and truck-littered interstate, Ben wondered if that was the way he’d end his span on earth. A bullet between the eyes and left to rot in some house or ditch?
Before he could answer his own question, an old woman trudging along the side of the interstate flagged him down. What did they used to call people like this? Ben thought.
Bag ladies. Yeah.
He leaned over and rolled down the passenger-side window. “Can I help you, ma’am?”’
She cackled, exposing the blackened, rotting stumps of teeth. “If I was twenty years younger, you damn sure could, young feller!”
Ben laughed. Young feller! “Thanks, lady. You just made my day.”
“Or if you was twenty years older,” she laughed again. ““Course, if that was the case, you probably couldn’t get it up no more, could you?”
“Probably not,” Ben said. “You want a ride?”
“Well, you look like a trusting sort, Mr. Ben Raines. But I think not. I just wanted to warn you not to go into Nashville.”
“How’d you know my name?”
“Seen some pictures of you a time or two. Country sure has gone to crap, ain’t it, Mr. Raines?”
“We’ll rebuild it.”
She smiled and shook her head. “No, we won’t, Mr. Raines. Not none of you nor me. Maybe two, three hundred years up the road. But we won’t know nothin” about it. Don’t go into the city. Thugs and shit-heads took it over. Turn back around and take the Gallatin exit. You a big, tough man, but don’t tempt fate.”
“Aren’t you afraid of going into the city?”
“Oh, they won’t bother me. Too old to do them any harm. They think I’m crazy so they leave me alone. Bye now, Ben Raines. Hang in there, kid.”
She picked up her sacks and went trudging on up the road.
Ben smiled as he watched her leave. “Luck to you, too, lady,” he muttered.
He turned the truck around and backtracked, found the Gallatin exit, and cut north, then west. It took him almost six hours to drive approximately one hundred miles. He finally pulled over after crossing the bridge at Lake Barkley, deciding to spend the night on the west shore of the lake and do some fishing.
He carefully hid his truck and laid out his sleeping bag on the porch of an old fishing camp, after first inspecting the cabin and several more nearby.
He got his rod and reel, gathered up several of his favorite crank baits, and walked down to the pier of the camp. Within fifteen minutes, he had caught half a dozen small-mouth bass. “Kentuckies,” he said aloud. That’s what we used to call them. “Damn, they must be hungry.”
Then he realized the lake probably had not been fished by sport fishermen in years.
He cleaned the fish, carefully inspecting the liver for discoloration. He fixed an early supper, recalling as he did, that this was how he’d first met Pal Elliot. He struggled to remember what part of the country he’d been in when he first met the man. Arkansas, he thought. They had talked about forming a new country-a country within a country. And Tri-States had been born on that evening, years back.*
But Pal was dead. And Valerie. And Salina. And hundreds more who had helped form Tri-States, and had fought for it, and died for it.
Sitting on the porch of the old fishing camp, watching the afternoon fade into evening, Ben smoked one of the few cigarettes he allowed himself daily-harsh, homemade cigarettes-and let his thoughts drift back into the past, something he rarely did.
But he could not allow much of that. And he knew it. It was dangerous. He, and others like him, needed to look constantly toward the future. That was the only way anything could ever be rebuilt from the ashes.
Far across the lake, Ben caught the first flickerings of a fire being built. No fires for me this night, he thought. Too dangerous. I don’t know if the people across the lake are friends or enemies; probably the latter.
