He stepped closer. She stood her ground. Out came the chin. “Ms. Roth, would you do me the honor of riding with me in this parade?”
She seemed taken aback. For a very brief moment. “Why in the world would I want to ride with you?”
“To harass me, to annoy me, and to be a constant source of irritation to me.”
“You talked me into it.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Westminster College was deserted except for one senile old man and several young ministers and their families who had elected to stay behind and care for the elderly man.
Some young people had been through, Mary was told, but they had not stayed long. Seemed like nice young people, but rather distant, one young minister said. He thought they might have all been related, they looked so much alike. Blond and blue-eyed, mostly. But, he told the small unit of Rebels, something about the young people had frightened them all, and none were sorry to see them leave.
Ben pointed the column toward Columbia. He wanted to check out the University of Missouri.
Columbia was a dead city, seemingly void of human life. But Ben, standing on the outskirts of the city, picked up a slight odor in the air, the breeze blowing from west to east. He knew what that odor was.
He shook his head in disgust. “Mutants,” he told his people. “I know that smell very well.”
A Rebel looked at Ben. “You killed one of them once, didn’t you, General?”
Ben was conscious of Gale’s eyes on him. “Yes, months ago.”
“Close up, General?” one of the new people from the campus at Rolla asked.
Ben smiled. “About as close as you can get without getting intimate with the thing.” He tried to brush off the question as lightly as possible. He knew only too well his battle with the mutant had only served to strengthen the belief among many that he was somehow more than a mere mortal.
When he moved off, walking down the center of Interstate 70, Gale asked, “What happened, Ben? I mean, the mutant.”
Ben had walked out of the communications shack and toward a thick stand of timber. He wanted to think, wanted to be alone for a time. More and more, since leaving Idaho he had sought solitude.
A young woman’s scream jerked his head up. Ben sprinted for the timber, toward the source of the frightened yelling.
Ben reached the edge of the timber and came to a sliding halt, his mouth open in shock.
It was a man, but it was like no man Ben had ever seen. It was huge, with mottled skin and huge, clawed hands. The shoulders and arms appeared to be monstrously powerful. The eyes and nose were human, the jaw was animal. The ears were perfectly formed human. The teeth were fanged, the lips human. The eyes were blue.
Ben was behind the hysterical young woman-about fourteen years old-the child of a Rebel couple. She was between Ben and the … whatever in God’s name the creature was.
The creature towered over the young woman. Ben guessed it was an easy seven feet tall.
Ben clawed his .45 from leather just as the creature lunged for the girl. She was very quick, fear making her strong and agile. Ben got off one shot; the big slug hit the mutant in the shoulder. It screamed in pain and spun around, facing Ben. Ben guessed the thing weighed close to three hundred pounds. And all three hundred pounds of it were mad.
Ben emptied his pistol into the manlike creature, staggering but not downing it. The girl, now frightened mindless, ran into its path. Ben picked up a rock and hurled it, hitting the beast in the head, again making it forget the girl. It turned and screamed at Ben. Its chest and belly were leaking blood, and blood poured from the wound in its shoulder.
Ben sidestepped the lumbering charge and pulled his bowie knife from its sheath. With the creature’s back momentarily to him, Ben jumped up on a stump for leverage and brought the heavy blade down as hard as he could. The blade cut through skull bone and brain, driving the beast to its knees, dying. Ben worked the blade out and, using both hands, brought it down on the back of the creature’s head, decapitating it. The ugly, deformed head rolled on the grass, its eyes wide open in shocked death.
Ben wiped the blade clean on the grass and replaced it in leather. He walked to the young woman and put his arms around her.
“It’s all over now, honey,” he spoke softly, calming her, patting her on the shoulder. “It’s all right, now. You go on and find your mother.”
A young boy stood a short distance away, holding hands with his sister. Both of them were open-mouthed in awe. “Wow!” he said. “He is a god. He can’t be killed.”
“He fought a giant and beat it,” his sister said. “Just wait ‘til I tell Cindy over in Dog Company about this.”
By now, many Rebels had gathered around. They stood in silence, looking at the beast with some fear in their eyes, looking at Ben with a mixture of awe, fear, respect and reverence.
Ben looked at the silent gathering. “You see,” he told them. “Your bogey men can be killed. Just be careful, travel in pairs, and go armed. Now go back to your duties.”
The crowd broke up slowly, the men and women and kids talking quietly among themselves-all of them speaking in hushed tones about Ben.
“Maybe it is true.”
“Heard my kids talking the other day. Now I tend to agree with them.”
“A mortal could not have done that.”
“So calm about it.”
“Tell you, gods don’t get scared.”
“Kid prays to General Raines before bed. Maybe it’s not such a bad idea.”
Ben heard none of it.
Ike stepped up to Ben, a funny look in his eyes. He had overheard some of the comments. “Are you all right, partner?”
“I’m fine, Ike.”
Ike looked at him. Ben’s breathing was steady, his
hands calm. Ike looked hard at the still-quivering man-beast. “I wouldn’t have fought that thing with anything less than a fifty-caliber.”
“It had to be done, Ike. Don’t make any more out of it than that.”
Ike’s returning gaze was curious mixture of humor and sadness. He wanted so badly to tell Ben that feelings about him were getting out of hand; something needed to be done about them.
But he was afraid Ben would pull out and leave for good if he did that.
Afraid! The word shocked Ike. Me? he thought. Afraid? Yes, he admitted. But it was not a physical fear-it was a fear of who would or could take Ben’s place.
Nobody, he admitted, his eyes searching Ben’s face. We’re all too tied to him.
“That was a brave thing you did,” Gale told him.
“I was there and it had to be done.” Ben stood, looking down at her. “I was lucky.”
“Maybe,” she replied cautiously. She did not tell Ben that all during her travels since the plague struck the land, she had heard of Ben Raines’s powers. At first she had dismissed the talk as the babblings of a hysterical populace seeking something to believe it, something to grasp during this time of upheaval. Now she wasn’t so sure.
“Let’s get rolling,” Ben told her.
The convoy backtracked, picking up Highway
54,
heading for Mexico, Missouri, where they would spend the night.
Ben and Gale rode in silence for a time, with Ben finally breaking the uncomfortable tension between them.
“Tell me about yourself, Gale.”
“I’m boring. I’d rather talk about you.”
Ben smiled.
