She thought: I still don’t have enough books or paper and pencils for the kids. Have to make do with what I have. I can’t chance another run outside this area.
She shook her head and walked inside to make a pot of tea. Tea, it seemed, was still relatively easy to come by. People would pass up the little tins of tea in their search for coffee.
The kids were still asleep.
She quietly fixed her tea, andwitha handful of crackers, walked back outside to sit on the porch.
She was certain she had heard gunshots. And that made her very uneasy.
Jordy practiced for several hours behind the wheel of the smaller truck. For a kid who had never driven in his life, the boy caught on very fast. He, of course, was no expert, but he could keep it between the ditches. And the going was very slow, anyway, the highways in such bad shape. Averaging thirty mph was doing very well.
They pulled out at eleven o’clock that morning. Terlingua was only about three miles away.
On the outskirts of the ghost town, Ben pulled over and told Jordy to stay in his truck while he prowled a bit. Smiling, Ben thought the warning a bit unnecessary. It would have taken a team of mules to forcibly remove the boy from behind the wheel.
Ben’s trained eyes soon picked up on someone’s attempts to hide vehicle tracks. It had been a pretty good job, but not done by an expert. And after fifteen minutes of looking, Ben straightened up, a puzzled look on his face. The footprints he’d found were all small.
He searched the ruins, suddenly sensing he was not alone. His eyes kept drifting to the big house overlooking the ruins. He walked toward the house.
Just the faintest finger of smoke came from the chimney.
The small footprints led straight to the house.
Standing beside a crumbling old adobe building, Ben called, “Hello, the house. I’m friendly. Anybody home?”
A bullet whined off the adobe, sending chunks of it flying. The slug missed Ben’s head by only a couple of inches. He ducked back.
“Now, Vic!” a woman’s voice came to him. “Now, I’ve got you. And this time I’m going to kill you.”
Chapter 18
“Madam,” Ben called. “My name is not Vic. If you will put away that cannon you’re firing at me, I’ll sling my weapon and step out with my hands in the air. I’m traveling with a small boy named Jordy. He’s with the trucks about a quarter of mile west of here. My name is Ben Raines.”
“You’re a goddamned liar!” Rani yelled. “General Raines is a thousand miles east of here.”
“Is your name Rani?” Ben called.
“Yes.” This time, the reply was softer.
Briefly, Ben told her, from his hiding place behind the adobe, the events of that morning. He ended with, “… I killed the men who had kept the boy enslaved. They were thoroughly despicable types.”
“Oh, God!” he heard her say. “The whole world’s gone mad.”
“Not all of us, Rani. Believe me, there are pockets of civilized behavior still to be found.”
“Step out, Mr. Raines.”
Taking a deep breath, Ben slung his Thompson and stepped out from behind the old building, his hands in the air.
A very shapely lady stepped out onto the long porch. She held an AR-1S in her hands.
“Ben!” Jordy called. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, Jordy,” Ben called. “Stay where you are until I come for you.”
“Yes, sir.”
Rani lowered the rifle. She walked from the porch to the old stone fence around the mansion and stood looking down at Ben. “I’m Rani Jordan, Mr. Raines. Nice to meet you.”
“You might change your mind, Miss Jordan. I think I’ve got about half the outlaws and warlords in the southwest chasing me.”
“I think I know the feeling,” Rani told him. “I don’t know the other warlords after me, but I do know Crazy Vic. Cowboy Vic. And he is crazy. Dresses like Sunset Carson, or one of those old-time cowboys. But don’t sell him short. He looks stupid with those six-guns hanging left and right; but he’s rattlesnake quick with them, and a dead shot with rifle or pistol. Do you know how many men we have chasing us?”
“I’d say about six hundred,” Ben informed her.
Rani paled under her summer tan. “Six hundred? Are you serious?”
“Oh, yes. So I would suggest we join forces and try to stay alive.”
“But there’s only two of us!” she protested. “We can’t fight six hundred men.”
“Sure, we can,” Ben said brightly. “Unless you want to surrender to them.”
“No way!” she said grimly.
“Then we fight to stay alive and free. There is no other way.”
Colonel Gray and his company of Rebels were literally fighting their way across Mississippi, then into Louisiana. It seemed they were in a firefight every twenty-five miles.
And race had once more reared up.
Everybody, or so it seemed, was fighting everybody else.
“Madness!” Colonel Gray said. “If there was ever a time for everyone to work together, this is it. Why can’t they see that?”
Every thirty or forty miles, the heavily armed convoy of Rebels would enter some new warlord’s territory, and the fighting would begin anew.
So far, the Rebels had suffered no deaths among their ranks; but several had been wounded, one seriously. About thirty-fives miles inside Louisiana, scouts reported a pocket of resistance; a group of people just trying to survive and get on with the business of living. The wounded Rebel was left at the small clinic there and Colonel Gray and his company moved on westward.
Captain Nolan and his platoon were dug in, fighting what appeared to be several hundred outlaws. Nolan was not worried about being overrun by the outlaws, for they appeared to be disorganized and very undisciplined. The Rebels were occupying a half block of brick buildings in a small Central Texas town. They had plenty of food and water and ammo. But they were stuck.
“Nothing?” Cecil asked the radio operator.
“Not a thing except heavy static, sir. Nothing from General Raines, Colonel Gray, or Captain Nolan.”
“Does the wall of static appear to be worsening?” Ike asked.
“Yes, sir. I can’t even reach our guard towers.”
“Shit!” Ike said.
“My sentiments exactly,” Cecil said.
Ben repositioned the trucks Rani had hidden, this time putting all of them into the building to the side of the house.
“We may have to make a break for it,” Ben explained. “We’ll want the vehicles as close as possible.”
Ben studied the town and the surrounding terrain. “We’re in a good defensive position,” he finally said.
All the supplies except for a three-day supply of food, water, and gasoline were removed from the trucks. Ben and Rani, with the bigger kids helping, began stockpiling wood, finally filling up one room of the house with fuel.
Ben left four M-16’s and plenty of ammo for each upstairs, one rifle at each end of the house, another at the front and one at the back.
“I don’t know why,” Ben said to Rani, “but I have yet to see a warlord who had any artillery of any sort.”
“It could be,” Rani said with a wry grin, “that they can’t find any. Probably due to the fact your Rebels took it all.”
Ben returned her grin. “Now you just may have a point there, lady. We have been known to commandeer certain items necessary for survival and self-defense.”
“Uh-huh.”
Both felt that tiny elusive spark begin bouncing around between them. And with personalities as volatile as those of Ben and Rani, that spark was sure to ignite something. Very soon.
