Willette wiped puke from his mouth and cursed the woman.
She laughed at him.
Ike approached Willette. He stopped two steps from him and swung the heavy rope, hitting the man in the face. Willette’s feet flew out from under him and he landed on his butt. His teeth clicked together and blood spurted from a bitten tongue. The rope had opened a gash on his cheek and bloodied his nose. Ike hooked the noose of the rope around Willette’s dirty neck and dragged him down the street to a windowless store front. Willette was screaming and cursing. Each time he would get to his feet, Ike would jerk the rope and Willette would slam to the street to be dragged another few yards, howling and protesting.
Ike stepped up and inside, looping one end of the rope over a support beam. He hauled Willette up, until the man’s boots were a full twelve inches off the littered floor. Ike secured the loose end of the rope and stepped out of the store, leaving Willette gagging and choking and slowly spinning and jerking. Ike did not turn around as he walked off. The act of hanging Willette would not bring Sally or the kids back to life, but it would ensure that Willette never committed another similar atrocity.
Only when the horrible gagging sounds had ceased did Ike look around. He looked at the swollen, blackened face of Willette. The man’s bowels had moved and the stench was as foul as Willette’s living character. Or lack of it. Ike spat on the concrete and walked back to his team.
Tina walked to Colonel Gray’s side. “What do we do with the rest of the prisoners, Colonel?”
“Shoot them,” Gray said.
First intercepted radio reports, picked up from walkie-talkies of the Rebels, indicated Sister Voleta’s troops were getting pasted by the Rebels. Sister Voleta and her troops had been running hard, pushing their vehicles as fast as road conditions would allow. They now stood at the end of an old firebreak road just south of Angelico Gap, listening to the reports filter in. None contained any good news for Sister Voleta.
AH the troops of the Ninth Order had discarded their robes for clothing more practical. Only Voleta wore a robe.
“We’ve had it,” a man told her softly. “Those men who tried to take cover near Lake Nottely were either shot to death or burned to death.”
“Barbarians!” Voleta spat the word. It did not occur to her that she had ordered the deaths of countless men and women and children by burning at the stake.
And the man reporting to her did not bring it up.
The man continued his depressing report. “We’ve lost contact with Captain Willette and his company. There are teams of Raines’ Rebels working all over the area. Ben Raines-was “I don’t want to hear that name again!” Voleta shrieked.
“Yes, sister.” The man bowed. He was faithful to the end, and the end was only moments away.
He opened his mouth to speak and Sister Voleta waved him silent. “I know, I know,” she said. “I thought we were strong enough to defeat… that pig. I was wrong. I shall be big enough to admit it. Very well. We are not beaten. Far from it. We shall someday emerge stronger than ever. But for now,
we’ll head for the gap and the highway just north of it. We won’t be able to take the vehicles any further. We’ll have to leave them here and walk the rest of the way.”
“Yes, Sister. I’ll take the point.”
“No, Lester.” She put a hand on his arm. “You and a few others stay with me. I have a feeling about this.”
“As you wish, Sister.”
They walked straight into a deadly ambush. Ben and his people were hidden in the gap and chopped the men and women of the Ninth Order to bloody rags with machine gunfire. After only a minute, Ben called for a cease fire.
The Rebels picked through the carnage, gathering up all the weapons and ammo and usable equipment. They stripped boots from the dead and any clothing that wasn’t ripped by slugs.
Sister Voleta was not lying among the dead and dying.
“That yo-yo got away,” Captain Rayle reported to Ben. “I don’t know how she managed it, but she did.”
I’ll have to contend with her someday, Ben thought. This isn’t over. Her hatred for me is so intense, she’ll keep trying to kill me, one way or the other.
I wonder if that baby was mine? he concluded. I guess I’ll wonder all my life. Unless I run into him someday.
Ben walked among the dead and dying, picking his way carefully among the bloodstained rocks and brush.
Will this never end? Ben silently questioned the force that controls the destiny of every living thing.
Will those who follow me ever be allowed to live in peace? Must we, for the remainder of our lives, go constantly armed, forever doomed to wage one battle after another, simply for the right to exist?
He thought of Gale and muttered, “I wonder how many times so many Jews wondered the same thing?”
A cold rain began falling, chilling the earth and those who still lived upon it.
Is that your reply? Ben pondered, remembering the savage night on the motel balcony.
Ben stopped his aimless wandering along the battlefield and looked down, looking into the eyes of a man who lay dying at his booted feet. The man spat at him and cursed him, the hate within overpowering the pain within and without. His voice bubbled from a chest wound and the rain that fell into his open mouth.
“It ain’t over,” the man gasped his promise. “You won this fight, but a lot of us got out. They’ll get you, Raines. And you’ll die hard, I can promise you that.”
“Why?” Ben asked.
““Cause …‘cause America didn’t work, that’s why. You … said so yourself, back in “89. All we was tryin’ to do was live our own way.”
“But your society was based on a twisted religion from the mind of a woman so overcome with hate it defied normal thinking.”
“Our right,” the man gasped, blood, pink and frothy, bubbling past his lips.
Lung shot, Ben thought.
“We’ll get you, Raines,” the man once more
uttered the death threat. “I wish I could be there to see Sister Voleta burn you at the stake. Listen to you scream and beg for mercy.”
“Why did you follow her?”
The man’s eyes rolled back in his head and he shuddered several times, his boots drumming on the wet earth. His final reply was a sighing of air leaving his dead body.
Ben looked at the men and women gathered around him. His Rebels. His.
I’ve got to get away from this, Ben thought. These people must learn to cope without me. They have to do that, for future generations. I must leave. And not just for their sake, but for my own, as well.
Ben sighed. “Let’s go home, people.”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Joni and George arrived at the slave camp just outside what used to be known as Perry, Florida just as the slaves were finishing with their former captors. It was not a pretty sight. Bodies were hanging from tree limbs, sprawled in death on the dusty grounds, and some had been staked out, spread-eagled naked under the sun, and covered with baby oil. The sun was slowly roasting them to death, in a most painful manner.
This was a much larger plantation, a combination cattle and farming operation, so there were almost twice as many slaves and almost four times the guards that had been at Live Oak. The fight had been savage and bloody, and the slaves, of all races and creeds and religions, had taken a number of casualties; but they had killed all the guards.
Joni introduced herself and George, asking, “How many more slave farms did Tony have, and where are they?”
“Four,” the leader of the Perry group said. “But we only have to worry about two of them. At the plantations in Clarksville and up in Graceville, the guards won. They killed all the slaves. Just lined them up and shot them down.” The speaker’s name was Lou,
a middle-aged man, but one who looked as though he had made his living as a stevedore prior to slavery. His
