"We'll hold our fire until we see what they're going to do. Pa.s.s it along, Corrie."

The street punks paused at the intersection, and they all got out of their cars and trucks and off their motorcycles to stand in the middle of the road and argue about what to do next.

Ben settled it for them. "Fire!" he yelled, and held back the trigger on the Thunder Lizard.

"Ambush!" Jimmy of the Indios screamed. It was his last scream. Fire from a Gatling gun cut him to b.l.o.o.d.y ribbons and flung him in chunks out of the road and into a ditch.

Dee Dee of the Pocos and several dozen of her gang were caught in a cross fire and died in the middle of the road.

The tanks of the Rebels opened up and the high-explosive sh.e.l.ls exploded the gas tanks of the punks' vehicles, setting dozens of punks on fire. They ran screaming in agony, running blindly in circles until Rebel bullets cut them down and silenced them forever.

Josh of the Angels, dressed all in white, very dirty white, charged Ben's position, cursing insanely. Linda sighted him in and cut him down, doubling him over with a three-inch-magnum round of double-ought buckshot.

Carmine of the Women and Stan of the Flat Rocks made it to cover. It didn't do them much good. A main battle tank swiveled its turret and blew them both to h.e.l.l with one round of high explosive.

What was left of Stan was flung high into the air, in pieces, and fell back to earth with a b.l.o.o.d.y plopping sound.

Manuel of the Mayas and most of his gang ran for their lives, running back down the road. The Scouts on the high ground chopped them up with M-60 fire.

Several miles back, those punks in the rear heard the gunfire and the booming of cannon and stopped, backing up and heading in the direction they'd come from. They ran right into Buddy and his Rat Team.

The Rat Team blocked the road as two rounds from their rocket launchers turned two cars into burning, smoking piles of junk, cooking those inside.

Ruth and her Macys and Hal and his Fifth Street Lords were about to run out of time. They jumped off the road and into the timber, right into the guns of the Rat Team on the other side of the road. Ruth and Hal and most of their gang members died cursing Ben Raines and his Rebels.

In West's section, the mercenary and his men were choppingup the street punks like so much liver. They had waited until the long convoy of cars and trucks and motorcycles had stretched out on the highway, and opened up with mortar and heavy machinegun fire.

Since West had a full battalion, unlike Ben's short section, the fight was just as brutal, but not nearly so time-consuming.

The d.y.k.es were gone, wiped out to the last person. The Discos were still and silent, sprawled in death. The Rappers had been among the first to be cut down. A few of the Santees escaped, wild-eyed and running in fear into the brush and timber of the hills.

The Temple Street Gang was wiped out to the last punk. And so on. The highway was slick with blood, and moaning drifted to the men behind the guns on the ridges.

"Spray them," West ordered. "No prisoners.

That's what the man said."

The gunfire resumed, briefly. The moaning stopped.

"Do we pursue them into the brush?" one of his men asked.

"No," the mercenary said. "They're all washed up.

The L.a. street gangs, this bunch of them anyway, are history."

Ben rose up on one knee and looked out at the carnage.

After a moment, Cooper said, "Prisoners, General?"

Ben looked at him. "No," he said softly.

"They had their chance. They blew it. Let's go visit a museum."

Chapter Three.

For reasons known only to G.o.d and to the pack of ignorant jerk-offs who did it, the telescope at Mount Palomar-the world's largest-and the museum on the ground had been vandalized. The telescope was pocked with hundreds of bullet holes. The museum had been destroyed.

"Ignorant b.a.s.t.a.r.ds!" Ben said.

"Do the Rebels find this to be common?" Linda asked.

"Vandalism?" Ben looked at her. "Yes. The libraries are almost always vandalized and destroyed.

As are the museums and art galleries."

"I don't understand that. But then, I've been secluded for a good many years." She smiled. "From reality, I'm sure you would say."

"That's correct. The why of the destruction?

Stupid, petty, ignorant people are afraid of knowledge.

Most certainly have the mental capabilities to absorb knowledge-they're just too d.a.m.n lazy to make the effort."

"And few of those people are part of the Rebel movement, right, Ben?"

"Correct."

"It seems I'm always playing devil's advocate with you. So here I go again. You and the majority of Rebels obviously don't care what happens to those people, Ben, even though they probablynumber in the hundreds of thousands. What happens to them?"

"Oh, some Rebel patrol will eventually roll into their sectors. We'll appraise the situation, and if they don't have schools, libraries, clinics, proper health facilities, we'll take the children and raise them ourselves."

She looked at him, disbelief in her eyes.

"G.o.dd.a.m.n, Ben. You don't mean that!"

"Oh, but I do. If we're going to pull this country out of the ashes, Linda, we can't have a nation of superst.i.tious, shortsighted, small-minded illiterates. The kids are the hope, Linda.

They're the future. They've got to be schooled, taught, and guided. We're not doing anything that child-welfare people didn't do back before the Great War.

We're just not as subtle about it, that's all."

Ben winked at her and walked off, to see if anything salvageable could be found among the rubble.

Linda looked around her, saw Jersey and Beth and Corrie and Cooper smiling at her. Coop said, "Close your mouth, Linda, before you swallow a bug."

She walked over to the team. "Sorry, gang. But what he just said came as a shock."

"The taking of children to raise and educate?"

Beth asked. "Why? Kids have been taken away from unsuitable parents for years, for one reason or another. We just enlarged the reasons, that's all."

"We've got over seventy-five outposts around the nation, Linda," Jersey said. "Seventy-nine, I think. Ranging in size from a few hundred to a few thousand people. General Jefferys calls them literate oasis surrounded by a desert of ignorance. That's pretty fancy, but accurate. People of all colors, all religions, all living and working together. No prejudices, no hatred, no trouble.

And people who have a lot of hang-ups about color, or who hate for no reason, or who like to cause trouble, are not a part of those outposts."

"Well, Jersey, what happens to those people?" "Oh, they hang around the fringes of the outposts, for safety.

But they're very careful what they say around our people. I think you're beginning to see that Rebels don't take a lot of c.r.a.p from people."

"We don't claim to be one-hundred-percent right," Corrie said. "And we do try awfully hard to be as fair as we can toward anybody who will just try- just a little bit comto work with us. But we're the only game in town that's working toward restoring this nation. There are a few things that cut across our grain that we will tolerate, and a lot we won't." She smiled and patted Linda on the shoulder. "Relax, you're fitting in like a glove."

They walked away to join Ben, and Buddy strolled over to Linda. "Getting force-fed a little Rebel doctrine, Linda?"

"Oh, yes. And I find some of it appalling."

"Dad says that what we're doing certainly would be declared illegal comif the nation were as it was before the GreatWar. But from what I can remember and from what I read, America was falling apart back then.

Lawlessness, drugs, illiteracy, misplaced values, lack of respect for the rights of law-abiding people, no faith in the elected leaders ... it all sounds pretty dismal to me."

"But ..." Linda started to argue. She stopped.

She found she really had no argument to offer; everything Buddy had said was true.

The ruggedly handsome and muscular young man, with a bandana around his forehead and holding the old .45-caliber Thompson machine gun, stood smiling at her, waiting.

"Conditions will never be as they were before the Great War, Linda," he said. "My father will never permit that to happen. Never."

"And if, G.o.d forbid, something were to happen to him?"

"We'll all die, Linda. Eventually. Even Ben Raines. When that happens, someone will step in and take over."

"Who?"

Buddy shrugged. "Cecil, Ike, Georgi Striganov, West, me, Tina ... who knows?

Thermopolis, maybe." He smiled at her smile. "Don't laugh. It's certainly possible."

"But not very probable."

"True."

She stared at the young man for a moment, then tried another smile. "What now, Buddy?"

"We're waiting to see if any punks tried the border, and what happened. Then we're going in and take San Diego."

"But we don't have any artillery rounds!"

"That's right. We do this the old-fashioned way, house to house."

Ben left Ike, Cecil, Georgi, and Seven Battalion 268 in the Los Angeles area. He pulled the rest of his command down to San Diego, along with Thermopolis, Dan, and Eight Battalion.

They gathered on the northern edge of the city.

"General Payon's people stacked up the punks along the border," Ben told his commanders. "Those who tried to cross over, that is. We let a lot of them slip through, heading east, and a lot of them broke past the northern perimeters. We'll meet them again some day. They're gathering somewhere, bet on that. Many of them are still in the city. We may be out of artillery rounds, but we sure as h.e.l.l have plenty of rounds for our other weapons, including mortars. And Cecil and Ike and Georgi have some nasty surprises in store for them.

"Now then, let's get to our jobs down here.

West, your battalion is to take I-5 down to I-8, and anything to the west of it. I-8 is the stopping point for us, for the time being. I'll take I-805 and anything to the west of that. Therm, take 163 and everything west of that to my sector. We'lllink up at the crossroads, here." He pointed it out on the map. "Eight Battalion will take I-15 and everything west of that over to Therm's section. Take this airport here, Montgomery Field. We'll use that to be resupplied.

Dan, I want you and your people roaming around out here between Mission Gorge Road and the Alvarado Freeway. Before we do anything, Buddy and his Rat Team are roaming around now, grabbing some prisoners.

We'll see what we'll be facing in a few hours."

"Everything that could make it in from the zone," Buddy reported. "Ten thousand or so, the dregs of the earth."

"Dregs they may be," Ben said. "But are they hostile?"

Linda looked at him, dreading what she had to say, but knowing it had to be said. She had personally seen to the blood work of the prisoners Buddy had brought in.

"They're carriers," she said softly.

Ben sat down on the edge of a table in a farmhouse that he was using as a CP. "We've taken some of those prisoner in the L.a. area," he reminded her.

"We don't have them anymore, Ben," Dan stated.

"What do you mean, Dan?"

"The Woods Children solved that problem."

They were all surprised when Ben walked to a small suitcase and took out a bottle of whiskey. He poured two fingers into a gla.s.s and drank it neat. He cleared his throat, gently placed the gla.s.s on a bureau, and faced the group.

"Do you mean to tell me that Ike and Cecil allowed the Woods Children to take those prisoners out and kill them?"

"They were a plague upon the land," Thermopolis said, his words soft. "A plague that if not checked would have eventually killed us all."

"Well now," Ben said, sitting back down.

"Let me digest those words from the world's oldest hippie." They waited while Ben rolled a cigarette and fired it off. "I thought life was oh-so-precious to you, Therm?"

"G.o.dd.a.m.nit, Ben!" Therm flared. "Life is precious to me. Rosebud's life, my life, my friends' lives, even your life, you hardheaded son of a b.i.t.c.h! There is no vaccine for what they carry. Chase had discovered that a certain virus that some of them are carrying might - might- be airborne. He's sent that back to Base Camp One for further testing. This goes against everything I believe in, Ben, so just get off my a.s.s about it, will you?"

Ben smiled. "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown."