For a full sixty seconds the air reverberated with the sounds and fury of gunfire. Most IPF personnel never got a chance to crawl from sleeping bags and blankets. They were shot to death, jerking and bleeding rags of flesh and bone, blood-splattered.
The young people watched and waited in silence. Occasionally, a shot would split the air as someone in the IPF camp moaned and stirred in pain. The shot would still the moaning.
The leader of the eastern-based young people, a young man of eighteen, named Ro, gave the quiet orders to move into the bloody encampment. Like his counterpart to the west, whom he had never met but had spoken with by radio, Ro was dressed in buckskins and jeans, moccasins on his feet. He was quite good with a bow, but on this night he used a twelve-gauge shotgun, loaded with slugs.
Ro did not know his last name, or even if the name Ro had been given him by his parents, whom he did not remember. He was called Ro-that was all the name he knew. He was a survivor.
“Take their uniforms,” Ro ordered. “And gather up the weapons and ammunition. Wash the clothing in the river and dry it. Hide their vehicles and bring me any maps you find.”
A ragged young boy of ten scampered down the embankment and began picking through the gore with others of approximately his age-although none of the young people really knew how old they were. The blood and the gore and stink of relaxed bowels and bladders seemed not to bother the young boys and girls as they conducted their grisly search.
The bodies were stripped down to their underwear
and left where they had fallen and died. Birds and animals would eat them.
“Food here,” a young girl called to Ro.
“We’ll eat now,” Ro told them.
The young people had learned what the Indians of America had known for centuries: Eat when you can, sleep when you can, drink when you can.
With the blood of the dead IPF members still soaking into the cool, grassy earth, the young people sat and squatted and began to eat among the men sprawled in grotesque death. All present had been born into the horror of war and its aftermath, and had lived through a police state by depending on their guile. Social amenities were few; the young people gnawed at their meat and hard biscuits, eating with their fingers. Their eyes constantly flicked from left to right, much like an animal when he eats, aware that someone or something was always waiting to steal the food should guard be relaxed. When the young boys and girls finished eating, they wiped their hands on their clothing and one by one melted back into the deep timber and brush to seek a place to sleep: a deserted house, a culvert, a thicket. In the morning they would plan another ambush.
The combat company of IPF personnel that rolled northward to “point the old men back to their rocking chairs” drove straight into hell. The American veterans allowed the scouts to pass through the ambush site, after blocking all other roads in the area, then wiped out to a person the entire company of the IPF. They then captured the scouts and hanged them by the side of the road.
Just before they hanged the scouts, one of the Russians muttered under his breath.
“What’d that Russian bastard say?” General Tanner asked.
“I said,” the IPF scout replied in perfect English, “that the old bee can still sting.”
“Damn right,” General Tanner told him. “Hang them,” he ordered.
Tanner flexed the fingers of his left hand and then rubbed his aching shoulder. Damned arthritis was acting up again.
When the first reports reached the desk of General Striganov, the Russian could not believe it. Three full companies destroyed-wiped out to a person. Not one man had escaped. It was incredible that children and old men could have done it. Striganov just did not believe it. It had to be a trick of some sort. Little children and senile elderly men do not destroy three companies of highly trained troops.
The thought came to him: Perhaps Sam Hartline lied to him?
No, he immediately rejected that notion. Hartline would have no reason to do that; that would be detrimental to the mercenary’s own goals.
President-General Ben Raines must have planted the false information about the children and old men and then had his own Rebels beef up the children and old men. “Vfes, that was certainly it. Striganov felt better now that he had worked it out in his mind. He leaned back in his chair and smiled.
Well, Striganov pondered the small problem, no point in mentally berating oneself about it; no point in flailing one’s mind with whips of defeat. It was done and over and that was that. But the mild irritation that for the first time his people were in a box nagged at him. Not a box with a very substantial lid on it, to be sure, but a box nonetheless.
And that irritated the general. Striganov liked for everything to be done neatly and orderly; he did not like irritation. It was … well, unsettling.
But, he thought, putting his hands behind his head, everything else seemed to be going quite well. No-not seemed to be going well-it was going well. The inferior minority women who had been forced to breed with the male mutants were swelling with new life. The mutant females who had copulated with the inferior minority men were likewise swelling with pregnancy. The areas controlled by the IPF were coming along quite well, and the people, while not content-many of them-were beginning to adjust to the rule of Hartline and the IPF. True, there were still pockets of resistance scattered about, but nothing that Hartline had not been able to contain, and contain it quite brutally. Fear was the great ruler, and Sam Hartline was very good at instilling fear.
Crops had been harvested and winter wheat planted in those areas suited for farming. Factories were now open-not too many, but there would be more as time passed.
Put people to work. That was the great pacifier. Idle minds and idle hands always meant trouble.
But for now, Striganov must deal with the problem of Ben Raines and his Rebels. And the old men. And the young people.
“Shit!” General Striganov spat out the American profanity. All was not progressing as smoothly as he would have liked.
But he had no doubts as to his success. Failure never entered his mind. Never. True, he would have to shelve his plan to kill the Jew bitch; and that had been a good plan, Striganov reckoned, one that would have sucked Ben Raines out into the open, seeking revenge. Or so Striganov thought. But the Russian did not know Ben Raines as well as he thought.
“Hello, baby.” Hartline smiled at Jerre. “My, you are a fine-looking cunt.”
Jerre remained silent for a moment. She knew why Hartline had kidnapped her, but she also knew the mercenary had grossly underestimated Ben Raines if he thought Ben would drop whatever he was doing and come to her rescue. She knew Ben was somewhere in Virginia, moving his Rebels toward Richmond, to seize the government from President Addison and Al Cody. Ben had told her several times: “No one in my command is unexpendable, Jerre. Person gets taken prisoner, we’ll come after him if at all possible. But I won’t risk losing a hundred people just to save one.”
And she knew Ben meant it.
“Where am I?” she asked Hartline.
He had laughed. “About a hundred miles from Ben Raines. You’re in Virginia, baby. Didn’t you have a nice flight out here?”
“Not particularly. Some of your men kept feeling me up. Where are my children?”
“They got away, so I’m told. Big, blond fellow took them. Friend of yours, maybe?”
“Yes. Matt. Good. Then I know that my babies are safe.”
She seemed satisfied with that.
Hartline sat looking at her. He seemed puzzled. He didn’t understand these followers of Raines. Even though he had broken half a hundred of them with physical torture, and raped and sodomized a half a hundred more, they always seemed to look at him as if he were the loser, not them.
Her smug expression angered the man. He reached out and slapped her hard across the face. She slowly brushed back her blond hair and continued staring at him.
“What’s with you people, anyway?” he demanded. “You sluts and losers seem to think Raines is some sort of God. What kind of fucking special society did you people have, anyway, to make you think you’re so much better than the rest of us?” He was shouting at her. “Answer me!”
Jerre realized she was dealing with a psychopath-at least that. And she had best walk softly in his
