to venture-that’s the word they used-over in that part of the country. Oh, Ike, I seen warlords near’bouts ever’where I been the past two, three years.”
Ike sat silent for a few moments, deep in thought. So Ben was right, he reflected. As usual. Ben said it would come to this. The survivors are spinning backward in time much faster than our ancestors progressed. Somehow, someway, we-and it’s going to be up to men and women my age-must put the brakes on this backward slide.
But how?
“Education,” he said aloud.
“What’d you say, Ike?”
“Education, honey. That’s the key. Education. Unlike what was advocated back in the sixties and seventies and eighties, there must be one type of education for everybody, regardless of race or religion or whatever. It’s that kind of shittiest-assed thinking that helped get us in the shape we’re in now. But if you said anything back then, you were immediately branded a racist,”
“Ike, what in the hell are you talkin” about? I don’t understand nothin’ you just said.”
“Let me put it this way, Nina. You know anything about mules?”
“Hell, yes. Horses, too.”
“Well, then, if you was to put two males in harness, and one wanted to go gee and the other wanted to go haw, you wouldn’t get a whole hell of a lot of plowin’ done, would you?”
“Any fool knows the answer to that. You sure as hell wouldn’t.”
“That’s the way it was with education when the country went liberal on us.”
“What’s liberal mean?”
Ike sighed and then laughed. “Honey, don’t get me started on that. Let’s just say that instead of trying to get a curriculum …”
She looked strangely at him.
“That means a course of study.”
“Oh.”
“A curriculum that would best educate all, regardless of color, some folks said that was unfair. Some among them-not all, certainly, but some-wanted to bastardize education. Instead of saying we are all Americans, we are going to live and work and speak in English, as set forth by men and women much more intelligent than me, we are going to call an object by its proper name, some wanted to twist and change all that. Some, again, not many, but some, wanted to bring the level of education down to their level, instead of really making an effort to climb upward. It didn’t work, Nina. One cannot regress, one cannot stand still. There is only one direction, and that is forward.”
“You sure do talk pretty when you want to, Ike. You know that?”
Ike laughed. “That’s the trick, honey. I can butcher the King’s English, but I have a solid base in good education. Some folks didn’t want that solid base.”
“I sure would like to have it. Anybody that wouldn’t must be next to a fool in their thinking.”
“That’s my opinion on the matter. And I’ll see that you get an education, Nina. I promise.”
“How much further to the lake?”
“We won’t make it today. We’re gonna have to take it slow and easy from now on. We’re right in the
middle of Ninth Order territory.” He got to his feet and slipped on his pack, picking up his M-16 and slinging the shotgun. “Let’s head out, Nina. And remember this: Before we stick our heads around a curve in the road, we quiet-like check what’s around the bend first. We’ve come too far to get caught now.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
The man lifted his eyes and surveyed the smoky scene that lay before him. Lines of fatigue creased his face. His upper body was burned to a shade of mahogany from years of working shirtless under the harsh sun. He held a bloody knife in his left hand, a .38 revolver in his right hand. Bodies littered the yard of the old plantation home in Live Oak, Florida, that Tony Silver had called headquarters before pulling out for south Georgia.
It had been a terrible, bloody fight between the guards and the slaves, and the slaves had spared no one in their fight for freedom. Many of the guards had women with them, and the women had fought alongside their men- and died along with them.
Those women who had been especially cruel to the slaves, some of whom had performed acts of perversion that would have at least paralleled the atrocities committed by the legendary Bitch of Buchenwald, were dying especially hard. Their screaming echoed faintly over the dusty, bloody grounds.
The freed slave looked toward the big house as a harsh scream ripped the air. Some of the guards’ women had enjoyed acts of sexual perversion-performed upon the men slaves. Now they were getting
a taste of their own evil corruption. And they did not seem to be enjoying it.
A freed slave came out of the great, old plantation house, zipping up his trousers and fastening his belt. He turned to a friend, “Damned bitch liked to see men being sodomized, thought I’d see how she liked it.”
“And?” the man asked.
“You heard her yellin’.”
A single gunshot blasted the still air. The woman’s screaming ceased abruptly.
The man with the gun in one hand and the bloody knife in the other turned his face from the plantation house. He didn’t blame the men for seeking vengeance, but he wanted no part of it.
From the women’s slave quarters a hideous yowling seemed to float forever on the warm air. The male guards who had forced the women slaves into acts of perversion with both men and women-and sometimes animals-were dying hard at the hands of the freed women slaves.
He could not and would not blame the women for seeking revenge.
He turned at the sound of footsteps.
“Soon all will be dead, George,” the woman said, coming to his side. “We’re free.”
George Berger looked at the woman dressed in tattered, faded blue jean shorts and ragged T-shirt. She wore no bra, and her breasts were full and firm, the nipples jabbing at the thin fabric of the T-shirt. That she was part Indian was obvious: The thick, black hair and high cheekbones and wide, sensual mouth marked that heritage. But her eyes were an Irish green
and her body was slender and stately proud. Her name was Joni. She had been captured by Silver’s men in the south of Florida and held in slavery for more than a year. She had been beaten and chained and raped and brutally sodomized, but her proud spirit had never been broken. She had been stripped naked and chained under the hot sun; she had been put in harness and forced to pull a plow like an animal; she had been humiliated in every conceivable manner, but her captors could not break her. Joni was the leader of the slave rebellion.
“Free from the bonds of slavery, yes,” George replied. “But where the hell do we go and what the hell do we do when we get there?”
Joni laughed, her laughter not quite covering the screaming from the men in the women’s quarters. She narrowed her eyes and glanced toward the low building. She shook her head and looked at the man. “You don’t like that, do you, George?”
“Do you, Joni?”
“No,” she said softly. “But nothing the women could do would compensate for what was done to them over the years.”
“I suppose so, Joni. I repeat: What are we going to do?”
“I keep forgetting, George, that you have been a slave for a long time. Have you ever heard of Ben Raines?”
George smiled. Despite the years of backbreaking work and physical and mental abuse, he still wore laugh lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth. “Joni, I haven’t been a slave that long. Sure. Ben Raines. That’s the man who formed his own nation
out west-back in ‘89, I think it was. What about General Raines?”
“I think we should take the people and head north. There, we can join Ben Raines and his army of Rebels. The word I get is that he’s moved his people into north Georgia and is forming another nation up there. As far as I know, General Raines is the only person attempting to bring back civilization, with schools and businesses and law and order. I think we should do that.”
George sighed as he nodded his head in agreement. “You suppose the general would have room for an
