Alone in the Ashes BY WILLIAM W. JOHNSTONE.

Prologue.

Ben knew he should feel some sort of regret; some feeling of sadness or sorrow at leaving his people-and they were his people-behind.

But the only feeling he could muster up was a feeling of freedom.

"Free at last," Ben said aloud, with only the wind and the truck to hear him.

And they gave no reply.

He shook his head at the paraphrasing ofDoctor King's famous statement, and wondered how many young blacks, a decade and a half after the world had exploded in nuclear and germ warfare, could even say who King was? Or for that matter, Ben pondered as he drove, how many young whites knew anything about J. F. K., or Watergate?

Most were too busy just staying alive in this world gone mad, Ben concluded. They didn't have time for school-even in those areas where school was available.

He sighed, the rush of cold wind carrying the sound away, out into the brisk autumn afternoon air.

He was not making very good time, even with the new truck his people had provided for him. The highways were getting worse and worse. And for some reason Ben could not fathom, highway maps were becoming as scarce as hen's teeth. Any map printed between '89 and '98 was to be treasured. He had heard that people were killing over highway maps. A good map could bring food, weapons, ammo, and on occasion, women.

Ben could not prevent a bitter laugh from pouring past his lips.

If a person could not understand the written word, how could they comprehend a map? And Ben knew from experience that a full seventy-five percent of those born after the World War of '88 were illiterate.

He had turned west at the deserted Tennessee town of McMinnville. A crude sign had stated Highway 70 leading north was closed to traffic, and another sign had stated Highway 56 north was closed to traffic. Ben doubted they were closed for any other reason except the whim of a local warlord or some religious nut who wanted a closed society to practice his or her mumblings upon.

On impulse, Ben jerked his Thompson submachine gun free of the clamps that held it upright, and laid the old weapon on the seat beside him.

"You and me, old boy," he said with a smile, "are outdated." He patted the smooth stock. "But we can still spit and snarl, can't we?"

Ben wore a .45 semiautomatic pistol belted around his waist and a long bladed Bowie knife on his left hip. In the rear of the camper-covered bed of the pickup, Ben carried a myriad of survival gear.

Tent and sleeping bag, extra clothing, a case of grenades, and two cases of .45-caliber ammunition. A rocket launcher and a case of rockets for the tube. Cases of food and jugs of water. He had a Weatherby 30-06 with scope, and a Remington model 1100 S.

W.a.t. shotgun with an extended tube that held enough three-inch magnums to stop a rampaging Cape buffalo. Strapped to both sides of the Chevy pickup, and on a special framework built on top, he carried five-gallon cans of extra gas. He had enough radio equipment in the truck to transmit anywhere within what used to be known as the United States of America.

After more than a decade of leading his people, constantlysearching for a place to put down roots and live and work and grow and rebuild from out of the ashes, Ben Raines was pulling out, heading out by himself.

He would be alone. In the ashes.

BOOK ONE.

Chapter 1.

Ben pulled off the highway just outside of what remained of Woodbury, Tennessee. Tucking his truck behind a farmhouse on the east side of the highway, Ben sat for several minutes, his eyes searching for signs of life. Falling back on years of experience, Ben knew after only a moment that he was alone.

He inspected the house, cautiously going from room to room. The house was, of course, ankle-deep with the litter left behind by rats and mice. When the rodents had eaten everything they could find to eat, they had left. But once they had done that, the roaches had followed.

The house was crawling with living waves of brown movement.

Ben pulled out of that locale and spent the night sleeping in the cramped s.p.a.ce under his camper.

He awakened to a cold dawn, under a sky that promised rain very soon. The dull grayness of the sky matched the landscape that surrounded Ben.

Everything around him seemed lifeless.

He didn't like this area, didn't like the feeling of foreboding it offered him. Skipping breakfast of any sort, Ben cranked the engine and pulled out, finding Highway 53 and taking that until connecting with a road that would take him to Interstate 40, at Lebanon. There, he drove over the interstate and pulled off the highway at the outskirts of town.

Smoke from wood and coal fires drifted up from houses in the coolness of morning. But, as Ben had so often sadly observed over the years, the homes were not centralized or grouped for safety or work. They were widely separated, which meant to Ben-and it had been proved time after time-that the people were not organized. And in these times of anarchy and warlords, and roaming gangs of thugs and punks and creeps and a.s.sorted savages, not to be organized was an invitation to die quickly.

And to let what was left of civilization die.

Ben spotted the gang of young men and women long before they spotted him.

Go on, Ben! he urged himself silently. Go on. Just pull out and avoid trouble.

But he knew he would not. That flaw, if it was a flaw, and Ben thought not, within him was rearing up.

Ben lifted his Thompson and cradled it, clicking the .45-caliber submachine gun in his arms. He got out of the pickup and stood by the hood of the truck, watching as the young people spotted him.

Back in my day, Ben thought, they would be called punks.

I'll still call them punks, he thought.

Ben stood tall and rangy and loose by his truck. The years had peppered his hair with gray andhad put a few lines in his face. But as Doctor Chase had told him, "For a man your age, Raines, you're in disgustingly good shape."

"Clean living," Ben had said with a smile, knowing what response that would bring from the crusty old ex-Navy doctor.

"Horse s.h.i.t!" Doctor Chase had replied.

"You're going to be a dirty old man, Raines."

"What do you mean, "going to be?"

"Hey, Dads!" one of the young men called.

"They's a toll for pa.s.sin" through here."

The young man was tall and slender and blond. He was dressed in dirty jeans, heavy boots, and wore a black leather jacket. His hair was very long and very dirty and very unkempt.

The knot of young men and women around the punk were, except for coloring and size, his mirror image.

Punks.

Ben was dressed in tiger-stripe field clothes.

His field pants bloused into jump boots. He had already stopped along the road and fixed a meager breakfast, boiling water to shave.

Even after a worldwide tragedy and a nation swarming with anarchy, the generation gap still holds true, Ben thought.

"Public road," Ben said.

"Not no more," the spokesman said. Ben pegged them all as in their late teens to early twenties. "We took over the road. Now you shut your mouth and pay up."

"You want money?" Ben said with a smile. Money had been worthless for years.

"You a real smart-a.s.s, ain't you?" a pouty young woman popped off.

"At least my a.s.s is clean," Ben told her.

"Dads," the tall young man said, reaching for a pistol on his belt, "you just bought yourself a world of hurt."

"Kill "im, Tad!" the young woman cried.

"Shoot his legs out from under him and let's watch him flop around."

"Yeah," Tad smiled.

Ben dropped the muzzle of the Thompson, heavy in his hands with its full drum of .45-caliber ammunition, and pulled the trigger.

The quiet morning air was shattered by the hammering of the old Thompson and the screaming of the dead, dying, and badly wounded.

Ben knelt down beside the young woman who had wanted Tad to shoot Ben's legs out from under him so she could watch him flop around.

The young woman had managed to pull a .38 out of her belt before Ben's Thompson had very nearly cut her in half.

Despite the events that had prompted the shooting, Ben felt some small waves of pity wash over him. The young woman was really, under the grotesquely and amateurishly made-up face, a very pretty woman. "It ain't fair," the young woman gasped.

"Tad said he was the boss of this town and he'd take care of us."

"What did you do with the people who refused to pay your toll?" Ben asked.

"Kilt 'em," the young woman groaned.

All feeling of sorrow for her left Ben.

She closed her eyes and lapsed into unconsciousness.

Tad screamed, his hands clutching his shot-up belly.

Ben walked back to his pickup and pulled out.

"You G.o.dd.a.m.ned c.o.c.k-sucker!" Tad screamed after him. "My town! My road! Jimmy kilt Lucas for it and I kilt Jimmy.

Mine!"

"You are certainly welcome to it," Ben said.

He rolled down the window and let the cold air fan him. "Should be quite an interesting trip," he said aloud. "Certainly starting out with a bang."

At an old truck stop just outside Nashville, Ben pulled off the interstate and into the parking lot, carefully maneuvering his way between rusted-out rigs and stripped cars. He tucked his truck between two rusting hulks that once were eighteen-wheelers, and walked toward what used to be the restaurant, his Thompson slung over his shoulder, the drum refilled.

He liked to stop at these old truck stops because sometimes he lucked out and could find, among the rubble, playable ca.s.sette tapes; he had left all his back in Georgia.

The first thing he spotted were two bodies, a man and a woman. The man had been tortured, then shot between the eyes. The woman had been raped, judging by the still-visible bruises on her inner thighs and the blood that had dried on her legs and b.u.t.tocks.

Like the man, she had been shot between the eyes.

Ben knelt down between the bodies. He touched them both. They were cold, but they had not been dead for very long. Bugs had not found them, and rats and dogs had not gnawed their flesh.

Ben walked the ruined and littered truck stop.

There was not another living soul-that he could see. He stood and looked down at the man and woman. He had seen so many dead and rotting bodies that they had long since ceased filling him with any emotion. They were now merely a part of the way things were.

He walked out of the truck stop and to his pickup.

As he pulled back onto the car- and truck-littered interstate, Ben wondered if that was the way he'd end his span on earth. A bullet between the eyes and left to rot in some house or ditch?

Before he could answer his own question, an old woman trudging along the side of the interstate flagged him down. What did they used to call people like this? Ben thought. Bag ladies. Yeah.

He leaned over and rolled down the pa.s.senger-side window. "Can I help you, ma'am?"'

She cackled, exposing the blackened, rotting stumps of teeth. "If I was twenty years younger, you d.a.m.n sure could, young feller!"

Ben laughed.

Young feller!

"Thanks, lady. You just made my day."

"Or if you was twenty years older," she laughed again. ""Course, if that was the case, you probably couldn't get it up no more, could you?"

"Probably not," Ben said. "You want a ride?"

"Well, you look like a trusting sort, Mr.

Ben Raines. But I think not. I just wanted to warn you not to go into Nashville."