Ben did not want to take him out of sight. “Ask him what he wants,” he said to Rani.
She did and the man shouted, “Whatever you got, missy. Give us your due for passin” on this road and you can head on out.”
“You believe him?” Ben asked,
“Hell, no!”
Ben shot the man in the center of the chest, the slug knocking him backward, sprawling on the dirt road.
“Get me my RPG and a rocket,” Ben said. “I’m not going to jack around with these road scum.”
Amid a ragged hail of gunfire from the outlaws’ vehicles, Ben locked a grenade in place, checked to see if Rani was clear of the back-blast, sighted in the trucks, and fired.
The lead truck must have been carrying several hundred pounds of explosives, and the trucks behind it must have also been loaded with dynamite, for when the rocket struck, the force of the explosion knocked Rani to the ground and flung Ben to his knees.
The blast momentarily impaired hearing, and the two of them could only stand and stare in awe and utter silence as bits and pieces of cars and trucks were tossed literally hundreds of feet into the air.
Ben and Rani stared at the destruction that lay in front of them. Burning metal and mangled bodies littered the road in smoking heaps. There were no survivors among the outlaws.
“Can you hear?” Ben asked her, shaking his head.
“In a hollow, echoing sort of way,” she replied. “It’s weird. Ben, what in the world was in those trucks-an atomic bomb?”
“Whatever it was, we sure can’t go back the way we came.” He looked at his maps. “This road makes a half circle and then connects with 93, some miles north of McGill. We’ll take it and chance it. Check your truck; see if any lead hit anything vital.”
Ben’s truck had taken most of the bullets from the outlaws’ rifles, none of them doing any real harm to the truck. They headed out, driving slowly up the bumpy road. It took them almost two hours to make the run on the rutted road. When they once more pulled onto Highway 93, it felt like a superhighway. They made camp and spent the night out in the open, far from dead towns with unblinking empty windows that seemed to remind Ben that life and love and hopes and dreams had once lived behind those silent walls.
Even after all these years, the feeling was disconcerting.
The eastern part of Nevada seemed to be void of human life-at least human fife that longed for a productive, orderly, civilized society.
The empty trend continued as Ben and Rani pulled up to the outskirts of Wells. Silence greeted them. It was also very cold.
“Idaho going to be colder than this?” Rani asked.
“Somewhat,” Ben said, in classic understatement.
“Ben, what happened to all the people?”
“I can’t answer that, Rani. I just don’t know. I’ve never seen it this desolate. Hopefully, the people banded together and moved out, probably to the west, where the climate is more conducive to growing gardens. But that’s just a guess. They might all be dead.”
She shivered in the cold wind. Ben put his arm around her shoulders. “How many people lived in this state before the bombings, Ben?”
“Oh, seven or eight hundred thousand, I would imagine.”
“Where in the hell did they all go?” she once more flung, the question to the winds.
Ben let the winds take it. He sure didn’t know the answer.
Chapter 32
They rolled through Jackpot, Nevada, at midmorning. A short time later, Ben radioed back to Rani.
“The old Tri-States, Rani. Welcome to a bit of history.”
“Jesus, Ben! It’s cold.”
“It’s also something else,” he reminded her.
“What?”
“Christmas.”
She was silent for half a mile, the tires humming on the concrete. “You’re right. My God, I had completely forgotten. Merry Christmas, darling.”
Ben knew they would encounter few, if any, people in the old Tri-States. While many had tried to move into the area, almost all had either left very quickly or been killed, for the Rebels had booby-trapped hundreds, thousands, of cars, trucks, homes. They had mined the timber and placed explosives in empty buildings. They had blown bridges and overpasses, poisoned a lot of the water sources.
The Rebels knew what had been rigged to blow. The Rebels knew what water was safe to drink. The Rebels knew what to touch and what to leave alone. The Rebels knew where guns and ammo and explosives were cached.
No one else did.
Ben led the way north at a fast clip. He was home. He had masterminded the Tri-States, and knew the highway system as well as he knew his right and left hands.
When they crossed Interstate 86, Ben traveled some twenty-odd miles and pulled over at a house he remembered. A close friend of Ben’s had lived in this ranch-style home. He, his wife, and their three kids had been killed by government troops during the assault of the Tri-States.
“Stay in the truck,” Ben told Rani. “And I mean, stay in the truck.”
She did not have to be told again.
Consulting a thick ledger, Ben moved around the home, neutralizing the traps. He cautiously entered the home and cut the trip wires. He lifted the top of the range in the kitchen and removed a half-pound of explosives. Smiling, he walked back outside and waved Rani in.
“It’s safe now,” he assured her. “Everything’s been neutralized.”
She looked at the mass of explosives in his hands. “Are you sure?”
He laughed at her. “Positive. Go on in and start setting up for the night. Firewood is stacked by the fireplace. It’s dry, but it’ll give us a good, quick, hot fire. I’m going to find us something.”
“What?”
Ben grinned. “A Christmas tree, darling.”
The first of Jake Campo’s teams arrived in the old Tri-States.
“Spooky,” one of the men observed. “Where the hell is all the people?”’
“Yeah,” another outlaw said, looking around him. “Man, we ain’t seen nobody since crossing the state line.”
“Weird,” the leader of the team agreed. He spotted a nice home sitting just off the highway. “We’ll bunk over there for tonight. I ain’t never seen so many nice houses.”
“I was told that in the Tri-States you had to keep your place lookin” good. If you didn’t mow the lawn, people would come in and mow it for you—then send you the bill!”
“It don’t make no difference, no more,” the leader said. “There ain’t no more Tri-States and pretty soon there ain’t gonna be no more Ben Raines, neither.”
He opened the front door. It was not locked, since the former residents of Tri-States had never locked their doors or taken the keys out of their cars or trucks (remember, folks, always take the keys out of the ignition. Don’t let a good boy go bad)!
The opening of the door tripped an acid-delay switch, tipping the glass vial to allow the acid to eat through a thin wire.
The entire team of Campo’s outlaws crowded into the den of the home.
“Nice place,” one said. “Lookie there!” He pointed. “Farwood all stacked up and ready for us to burn.”
The wire parted with a soft ping.
“What the hell was that?”
“Your imagination, probably. Come on. Let’s get settled in and fix some grub.”
Fifteen pounds of high explosives blew. One entire wall collapsed on the outlaws; beams fell from the ceiling,
