lead traveling down his leg, exiting just above his knee. He pulled himself up and leveled the 9mm, pumping three rounds into the dark shape by the side of the house. The man went down, the rifle dropping from his hands.
Ben pulled himself up, his leg and hip throbbing from the shock of the wounds. He leaned against the truck just as help reached him.
“Call the medics!” a neighbor shouted. “Governor’s been hit.”
“Help me over to that man,” Ben said. “He looks familiar.”
Standing over the fallen man, Ben could see where his shots had gone: two in the stomach, one in the chest. The man was blood-splattered and dying. He coughed and spat at Ben.
“Goddamned nigger-lovin” scum,” the dying man said. He closed his eyes, shivering in the convulsions of pain; then he died.
“God, Governor!” a man asked, “who is he?”
Salina came to Ben, putting her arms around him as the wailing of ambulances grew louder. “Do you know him, Ben?” she asked.
“I used to,” Ben’s reply was sad. “He was my brother.”
“That’s horrible, Ben,” Gale said. “Your own brother hated you enough to want to kill you?” “He was part of Jeb Fargo’s Nazi establishment outside
of Chicago,” Ben explained. “To this day, I don’t know why or how he changed so radically in his thinking.” He looked at Nancy. “You want to continue?”
“Yes,” she said. “My father took us-my mother, my sister, my brother-and went west, into Iowa. We settled in Waterloo. We survived,” she said it flatly. “But it sure wasn’t any fun doing so. Never enough to eat, cold and tired most of the time that first year or so. But it gradually got better as things began to settle down. My mother died in ‘93, my father died a year later. My older sister raised my brother and me. We lived through Logan’s … reign in office. My older sister always talked about heading out to Tri-States, but somehow we never did get around to doing that. Then Tri-States fell and after that the country seemed to fall apart. I was seventeen when … the troops invaded Tri-States.
“We got through the horror of Al Cody and VP Lowry and all that… awfulness, all the hate and the discontent. Somehow.
“One day my sister and my brother went out to look for food. I was sick and they didn’t want me to go “cause the weather was bad and I was just beginning to get better. I had pneumonia.” She sighed. “That was last year. They never came back. Then one day the rats came. I never saw anything-up to that point-so … so horrible in all my life. And I thought after having lived through the bombings and the roaming gangs of thugs and all that, I could handle anything. I must have a mental block about the rats, because I really can’t recall much about them. I know I panicked. I ran. I ran blindly. I don’t know how I survived, but I did. In a manner of speaking.”
Tears ran down the young woman’s face and Gale reached out to take her hand and hold it.
“I can’t ever have children. The IPF doctors … gave me a shot. Me, and hundreds-maybe thousands-of other women, and men, too. Orientals, Hispanics, blacks, Jews, Indians.” She wiped her eyes and shook her head. “There is some sort of armed resistance movement north of Interstate 70, General. That was why they were torturing me. Or so they said. I think those people just like to torture people. I know they do. I heard some of them say so. I saw … I saw several of the men masturbating while they watched me being tortured. They … they would stand in front of me, where I was strapped down, and … ejaculate in my face.”
When Gale looked at Ben, the rage of five thousand years was printed invisibly across her face. It seemed to say: Five thousand years of persecution is enough. This time, stop it forever.
“All right,” Ben said.
The other men and women gathered around looked at each other in confusion, not understanding what had just silently transpired between the man and woman.
Ben swung his eyes from Gale, returning them to Nancy as he saw her rub her arm. His arm picked up the numbers tattooed on her forearm. J-1107.
“The J stands for Jew?” Gale asked, a husky quality to her voice.
“Yes,” Nancy replied. “B for black. O for Oriental. H for Hispanic. I for Indian. M for mental defective. I’ve seen other letters but I don’t know what they represent.”
Ben felt sick to his stomach.
Gale was silently weeping.
Ben looked around at the silent circle, more than one man had tears in his eyes.
Nancy resumed her horror story. “Sam Hartline and his men took me, tried to make me tell what I knew about the resistance movement. But I didn’t-still don’t-know anything about it, other than that it exists. They … really had a good time with me,” she said, keeping her eyes downcast. “I … don’t know how many times they raped me or how many men. And women. The women would strap… would strap huge penises on and … rape me. There is something terribly perverted about many of those people-maybe all of them. I was raped in every way possible. Over and over. It got so I could sometimes block it out.
“They beat me, shocked me. They attached wires to my breasts and my … my genital area. The voltage was never strong enough to knock me out. It just hurt so bad. They forced objects up my … you know. I know they are doing some kind of experimental medical work up there in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Like the Nazis used to do way back then. But I don’t know what kind of experiments. Something to do with the mutants, I think. Mutants and humans.
“They kept questioning me, but I think they knew I was telling the truth. They just wanted to see how much I could take. I guess I’m stronger than I thought. What could I tell them? I didn’t know anything. I think I would have told them anything. Anything to stop the pain and the humiliation. The pain.” She
shook her head.
Nancy held up her left hand. All her fingernails were gone.
“I’m not a coward, but a human being has limits,” she said. “They finally stopped. Just quit. I thought I was dreaming. Maybe dead. I didn’t know a person could hurt so much in so many places. I don’t even remember the ride down to Missouri. When I woke up tied to that tree, I was naked and cold and hungry and sick. They left me with a little reminder of them. The men, I mean. They had attached a dog collar around my neck and defecated on me.”
Ben was then conscious of a pain in his right hand. He had clenched his fingers into a tight fist.
“I managed to get loose from the tree and found an old farmhouse and cleaned up. I wrapped up in an old quilt and walked down the road until I came to another house. I found some old clothes there. I found a gun and some bullets on a dead man and taught myself how to shoot the thing. I’m not very good at it, but I sure scared the shit out of some mutants, I know that. I hit a couple of them. Then they began tracking me.”
She lifted her eyes, looking at Ben. “They-the mutants-have some kind of intelligence, and some sort of communications system. They have to have that, because they were always one jump ahead of me.”
“Interesting,” Doctor Chase said. “That confirms what I thought all along.”
“And that is?” Ben glanced at him.
“The mutants have leaders, pack leaders, den leaders, if you will, who possess more intelligence than the others. And they have organized them; they have their own form of pecking order.”
“And the males like human women,” Gale added.
“How ghastly,” Colonel Gray remarked. “I believe I could have gotten on quite well without that knowledge.”
“And me,” Gale said. “Gross!”
“Best to know the type of enemy we are facing,” the doctor said. “And it appears we have more than one enemy.”
Chase did not look or act his age. His wife, a woman forty years his junior, could well attest to that. She had just borne him a child.
“What can you tell us about the IPF, Nancy?” Ben asked.
“Not a whole lot,” she admitted. “But I did hear the men talking some when they weren’t torturing me. Something about some new people coming in from Iceland. I kept fading in and out, but I think-no, I’m sure-they said several battalions.” She looked at Ben. “Does that help any?”
His smile held no humor. “Well, yes and no, Nancy. I don’t know the size of their battalions, but we’ll call it twenty-five hundred personnel per battalion. Let’s call several three. That would mean we now have approximately
