“And … Gale?” Cecil asked softly.
Tina smiled. “She wants him to go-alone. She is fully aware of the fact that no woman holds Ben Raines’ attention for very long. Not since Salina. Dad is going to fall really in love one of these days. And when he does, it’ll be a sight to see. But for now, he wants us settled in tight, Gale to have a home, and then he’ll wander.”
“He’s not going to want any bodyguards,” Mark said.
“No,” Tina agreed. “And if anyone tries to burden him with them, he’ll find a way to shake them.”
Cecil sighed. “Let’s face that when the time comes
around, people. Right now, though, let’s all get some much-needed rest for a few hours. We’ve still got a lot to do.”
Ben halted his convoy at a motel complex just off Interstate 85 and ordered then to eat and rest. Everyone was beat, some near exhaustion. Ben looked as refreshed as if he’d just risen from an uninterrupted eight hours’ sleep.
After a cold meal, most of the Rebels unrolled their sleeping bags and bedrolls and crashed on the floor. They were asleep in five minutes, oblivious to the storm that raged outside the motel complex.
Ben and Gale, after tossing everything in the motel room outside, and checking the carpet for fleas and other vermin, inflated the air mattress and laid a double sleeping bag over the gentle firmness. Gale was sleeping in two minutes.
Ben stood just outside the closed motel room door, watching the lightning lick across the night sky, the wicked needles lancing furiously, bouncing and lashing through the low heavens.
Ben looked at the firmament. “Where is it all leading?” he questioned the night. “Are you going to give us one more chance, or is this your way of saying the human race has had it, all because we failed you?”
Thunder crashed and scolded the sodden ground; another burst of lightning flickered acidly, illuminating the lone man standing by the railing of the second floor. More thunder rolled, punishing the air with waves of fury.
“Sorry,” Ben said, “but this display further convinces
me that you had a hand in all that happened.” Ben’s words were not audible over the howling fury. A line from a long-ago Tennessee Williams play came to him: Hypocrisy and mendacity. “That’s the way the world was leaning, right? Sure. Get drunk on Saturday night and dress up in finery on Sunday and go to church and pray for forgiveness at best, go to church for the show of it at worst. Cheat your friend, your neighbor, the customer, and fuck your best buddy’s wife. Right? Yeah. Buy expensive grown-up toys while half the world’s children starved to death and this nation’s elderly had to grub around in garbage cans just to survive. That is, if the summer’s heat or the winter’s cold or the damned street punks didn’t kill them-right?”
The worst and harshest slash of lightning Ben had ever seen lit up the entire sky. The sulfuric display was followed by a deafening crash of thunder. More lightning danced from cloud to cloud and from cloud to earth.
Ben stood undaunted and unafraid and alone on the balcony. “What are You attempting to tell us, or me?” Ben questioned the almost mindless fury of the storm. “Or are You trying to say anything at all? Do You even exist? Or were You just a figment of someone’s vivid imagination thousands of years ago?”
The earth trembled under the barrage of God’s wrath.
Ben stood with his face to the heavens-and toward Him. “All right, all right,” he said. “What’s the matter; can’t You take a joke?”
The lightning and thunder ceased abruptly, the rain picking up in volume.
“That won’t do it,” Ben said. “I don’t believe in miracles, and the rain alone won’t wash it clean. Hundreds of years must pass before portions of this earth-Your earth-will once more be inhabitable. I believe You allowed the disaster to happen. Now what are You trying to do, ease your conscience?”
The lightning and thunder began anew.
Ben laughed. “I’m not afraid of Y. I respect Y. But I’m not afraid of Y. I’ll tell You what: I think You’ve given up on this planet. That is my belief. I have always believed this planet earth was only one of many You populated with beings. And now You have turned Your attention to others. Fine. I don’t blame You a bit. Now I don’t know about this fellow called the Prophet who is wandering about, following me. I don’t know what he’s trying to tell me. But I do know this: I am not the man to restore Your earth. A little part of it, maybe. But the rest is up to Y. So get off my back. I’m tired. I’m going to wander for a year. Maybe longer. Alone. Leave the machinery of government and building nations in someone else’s hands. Cecil Jefferys. He’s a good man. One of the best I’ve ever seen.”
The lightning and thunder and driving rain eased off a bit.
“Interesting,” Ben noted aloud. “I’ve had some strange conversations in my time, but this takes the cake.”
A lone spear of lightning touched down.
“All right,” Ben said. “It’s pure survival from this point on, isn’t it? Sure. Little pockets of determined people will set up fortress-like villages and try to pull something constructive from the ashes. Maybe
they’ll-we’ll succeed. I’ve got something like that in the back of my mind. After I return from my wanderings. I think we’ve got maybe a seventystthirty chance of success. With us on the low end of the odds scale.”
The rain had dwindled down to a sprinkle; the lightning had completely stopped.
“All right,” Ben spoke to that which only he could hear at that moment. “Fine.”
He walked back into the motel room, undressed, and lay down beside Gale. She turned to face him in the darkness.
“I thought I heard you talking to someone, Ben.”
“You did. I was carrying on a sort of conversation with God.”
Several moments of silence passed. “Really?” she finally said. “Did He reply to your mutterings?”
“Well, yes. In a manner of speaking.”
“Sometimes I worry about you, Raines. I really, really do.”
She rose from the pallet and wandered around the barren room.
“What in the hell are you looking for?” Ben asked. He was thoughtful for a moment. “Don’t tell me; let me guess: You’re hungry.”
In reply, she bit deeply into the crisp tartness of an apple.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The savage torrents of rain and storm blew past the town of McCormick, South Carolina, in the early morning hours. But the raging passage had also concealed the movements of Sam Hartline’s men as they slipped silently into position in the town. With practiced ease, the mercenaries planted explosives around the town, enough explosives to flatten three towns the size of McCormick.
Easy, Hartline thought, smiling in the night. Raines has become so confident he’s let his guard down.
The top mercenary knew that happened to the best of people at times. He remembered the time when he’d had one of Raines’ women, Jerre, the blond beauty. He, too, had become overconfident and let his guard down. That moment of carelessness had almost cost Hartline his life.*
He remembered it with bitterness and hate on his tongue.
Smiling, he lifted his walkie-talkie. “Now!” Hartline whispered hoarsely into the speaker cup.
The small town of McCormick blew apart from the *Fire in the Ashes
massive charges of explosives planted in key locations. The gasoline in the cars and vans and trucks of Tony Silver and the men of the Ninth Order ignited and blew, sending flames leaping into the air and illuminating the now clear and starry night.
Bits and pieces of bodies were hurled through broken windows to land in a sprawl on the littered street. Great bloody chunks of once human beings were flung about like damp bits of papier-m`ach`e. Ropelike strands of intestines coiled and steamed in the fall coolness. Screaming, mortally wounded men crawled about on the street, yelling for help, watching their life’s blood pour from them. Heads without bodies bounced and rolled on the concrete.
As the men being attacked fought their way out of sleep and fear and confusion, reaching for their weapons and their pants, running out into the streets, they were chopped to bloody shards of flesh by heavy machine gunfire. AK’S and M-16’s and M-60’s and heavy .50-caliber slugs ripped and tore and spun the men around to fall in dead heaps on the concrete.
“No prisoners!” Hartline yelled over his walkie-talkie. “Kill them all except Ben Raines. I want to shoot that son of a bitch personally.”
