of disgust passed quickly over his face at that thought. The general had already seen to Mikael. “Iowa would be a good place to locate him and for us to meet, I believe.” He studied the map on his office wall. “Yes. Ask Mr. Raines to meet me at, ummm, ah, Waterloo.” He smiled. “Yes, Waterloo, Iowa. That should be a very appropriate place, don’t you think, Sam?”
“For one of you,” Hartline grunted his reply. The Russian did not know Ben Raines as well as Sam. Ben Raines would never permit a communist form of government to exist alongside his own. At least Hartline didn’t believe he would.
Not for any length of time.
But… maybe it was worth a shot.
On the morning of the third day in Hannibal, the column pulled out, rolling northward on Highway
61.
Ben had cautioned his people to be careful, for he remembered only too well the incidents last year, when the Rebels were moving west out of Richmond, when the government collapsed.
The scouts had failed to report in at their given time. Ben and the convoy waited impatiently on the cold, wind-swept highway. The bridge at Fort Madison had been plugged up tight with stalled and wrecked cars and trucks. The scouts had radioed back they were going on to Hamilton, taking a secondary road. Ben waited a long half hour past the time they were supposed to have radioed in. He turned to Cecil.
“I’m taking a patrol,” Ben told him. “I’ll call in every fifteen minutes. Anything happens, you’re it.”
“Ben…”
“No. It’s my show. Maybe the radio conked out. Could be a lot of things. I’ll be in touch.”
Back in his pickup, Ben looked at Rosita. “Out,” he told her.
She refused to leave.
“Do I have to toss you out bodily?”
“That would look funny,” she calmly replied.
Ben closed the door and put the truck in gear. “Your ass,” he told her. He pulled out, leading the small patrol.
Rosita smiled at him and said something in rapid-fire Spanish. It sounded suspiciously vulgar.
“Check your watch,” he told Rosita.
“Ten-forty-five.”
“Call in every fifteen minutes. It’ll take us forty-five minutes to an hour on these roads to get to Fort Madison. That was their last transmission point. Whatever happened
happened between there and Hamilton. You’ve got the maps. What highway do we take?”
“96 out of Niota.”
At Nauvoo they found the pickup parked in the middle of the highway. One door had been ripped off its hinges and flung to one side of the road.
“What the hell?” Ben muttered.
Rosita’s face was pale under her olive complexion. She said nothing. But her eyes were frightened.
Ben parked a safe distance behind the pickup and, Thompson in hand, off safety, on full automatic, walked up to the truck. Thickening blood lay in puddles in the highway.
“Jesus Christ!” one of Ben’s Rebels said, looking into a ditch. “General!”
Ben walked to the man’s side. The torn and mangled body of the driver lay sprawled in the ditch. One arm had been ripped from its socket. The belly had been torn open, the entrails scattered about, gray in the cold sunlight.
A Rebel pointed toward an open field. “Over here!” he called.
The second scout lay in a broken heap, on his stomach. He was headless. Puddles of blood spread all about him.
“Where’s his head?” the man asked.
“I don’t know,” Ben answered. “But we’d damn sure better keep ours. Heads up and alert. Combat positions. Weapons on full auto. Back to the trucks in twos. Center of the road and eyes moving. G.”
Back in the warm cab of the truck, Ben noticed Rosita looking very pale and shaken. He touched her hand. “Take it easy, little one. We’ll make it.”
He radioed in to Cecil. “Cec? Backtrack to Roseville and 67 down to Macomb. Turn west on 136. We’ll meet you between Carthage and Hamilton. Don’t stop for anything. Stay alert for trouble.”
“What kind of trouble, Ben?”
Ben hesitated for a few seconds. “Cec-I just don’t know.”
“Ten-four.”
Ben honked his horn and pulled out, the other trucks following.
They saw nothing out of the ordinary as they drove down 96. But Hamilton looked as though it had been sacked by Tartars followed up by hordes of giant Tasmanian devils.
“What the hell?” Ben said, his eyes taking in the ruins of the town. Bits and scraps of clothing blew in the cold winds; torn pages of books and magazines flapped in the breeze, the pages being turned by invisible fingers. Not one glass storefront remained intact. They all looked as if they had been deliberately smashed by mobs of angry, sullen children.
There was no sense to any of it.
Ben said as much.
“Perhaps,” Rosita said, venturing forth an opinion, “those that did it do not possess sense as we know it.”
“What are you trying to say, Rosita?”
“I… really don’t know, Ben. And please don’t press me.”
“All right.”
Ben cut to the bridge and saw it was clear except for a few clumsily erected barricades. They looked as though they had been placed there by people without full use of their mental faculties.
Rosita said nothing.
Ben radioed back to the main column. “Come on through to the bridge at Keokuk, Cec. But be careful.”
“I copy that, Ben. Ben? We just passed through a little town called Good Hope. It looked … what was it the kids used to call it? It looked like it had been trashed.”
“I know, Cec. The same with Hamilton. Just no sense to it.”
“Well be there as quickly as possible, Ben.”
“Ten-four.”
With guards on the bridge, east and west, Ben and the others cleared the structure in a few minutes. Beneath them the Mississippi River rolled and boiled and pounded its way south, the waters dark and angry- looking.
“They look like they hold secrets,” Rosita said, her eyes on the Big Muddy.
“I’m sure they do.” Ben put an arm around her shoulders, pulling her close.
They stood for a time, without speaking, content to be close and to look at the mighty flow of water rushing under them.
“General?” one of the men called, “lake a look at this, sir, if you will.”
Ben and Rosita walked to where the man stood. Painted in white letters on the bridge floor, close to the railing, were these words:
GOD HELP US ALL. WHAT MANNER OF CREATURE HAVE WE CREATED? THEY CAME IN THE NIGHT. I CANNOT LIVE LIKE TH.
It was unsigned.
“He was talking about the mutant rats,” Ben said.
Rosita looked at him, eyes full of doubt.
“I wonder what happened to the person that wrote this?” the Rebel who discovered the message asked.
“He went over the side,” Rosita said.
“Probably,” Ben agreed.
