Out of the Ashes

“Ah do thank y'all so much, Mr. Raines.” She gushed sorghum molasses all over him, for Logan's benefit.

Ben smiled. “Ah, too, have enjoyed yore company, ma'am.” He returned a measure of ribbon cane syrup. “You have been like a light in the wilderness to me.”

She leaned close, her body hiding the movement of her right hand as it gently squeezed Ben's crotch. “Don't lay it on too thick, you damned Yankee—he'll think we're both nuts!”

SIX

So now Ben was alone. He felt her absence more than he would have ever thought although he knew eventually they would have devoured each other with their conflicting personalities. But he missed her, nonetheless.

Steady pussy; he smiled as he drove. But he knew it was more than that.

He made it through Memphis without incident and headed north, on the interstate, toward Cairo. He spent the night in New Madrid, Missouri, a small boot-heel town. And as the night spread its blanket of darkness around him, it was then that Ben missed Fran the most.

The next morning, in Sikeston, Missouri, a few miles north of New Madrid, Ben pulled into a shopping center and found a good cassette recorder and several good quality cassettes. He also picked up a small portable typewriter. Turning at a slight noise, Ben saw a small boy, no more than nine or ten, racing out of the store. He called to him, but the boy refused to stop. Ben thought about chasing him, then gave it up. There were hundreds, thousands of places to hide. He only hoped the boy was not on his own, for Sikeston's streets and, he was sure, its homes, were littered with the dead, stiff and stinking.

He drove around the town, and saw a few more live people, none of whom would answer his call. He said to hell with it and pulled back on the interstate, heading north.

As he drove, he experimented with the recorder, making the first of what would eventually be thousands of vocal notes and observations and comments.

He thought about what the colonel had said to him and shook his head in disbelief. “Commander of a Rebel army!” He laughed. “Shit!”

And as he drove, he found the memory of Fran already fading as the excitement of what lay before him intensified and spread itself out in his mind, exposing to his mental light all the ramifications and historical aspects of his one-man Odyssean undertaking.

“Maybe a hundred years from now I'll be famous.” Ben grinned, speaking aloud.

He would be, but it would be for something other than his writings.

As he crossed the river into Cairo, Ben slowed and became more alert, scanning the channels of his CB for any chatter—good or bad.

A voice leaped out at him. “Truck jist crossed the bridge.”

Ben turned on the recorder, the volume up high to catch all the words.

“How many?” another voice asked.

“Jist the one dude.”

“No pussy with him?”

“Naw.”

“Damn! I don't think they's a goddamned cunt left in this town. How old is this dude? If he's a kid and he's pretty, we can take turns cornholin’ him.”

“Cain't tell. He's gittin’ out of my sight, turnin’ off on 51.”

“We'll foller him, laid back, sort of. You listenin', Ralphie?”

“Yeah,” Ralphie answered.

“You and Tarver take your pickup and block this side of 51, over there by that old beer joint we used to hang out at—you ‘member it?”

“Yeah. Will do. If he's too ugly to cornhole, we'll have us some fun with him ‘fore we kill him.”

Ben's smile was savage, a pulling back of the lips into a snarl. “Sorry to spoil your fun, boys,” he muttered. “But I'm going to see if I can't rid the world of some human scum.”

Why is it, he thought, the scum always seem to survive any tragedy?

He shrugged away the age-old question and smiled grimly. What those scumballs didn't know was that Ben knew Cairo probably better than they knew it. He'd had his first woman—a whore—in Cairo, back when strippers were still bumping and grinding in various clubs.

Ben turned down a side street, jumped out of the truck, and walked to the rear. He quickly assembled the antitank weapon. It was a one-shot, one-time affair, and Ben had never understood why the Army had replaced the bazooka with it, as the bazooka could be used over and over. But, he didn't recall the Army ever asking for his opinion. He readied the LAW and laid it in the bed of the truck; then clicked his Thompson off safety.

Soon, he heard the sounds of a car approaching, and smiled when he saw the vehicle: a new Cadillac. Then he knew the mentality of the men after him: “white trash,” folks in the south called them, and they were correct in that name. He listened to the CB in his truck to be certain he was about to zap the right men. The speaker rattled as the volume grew louder with the approach of the Caddy. Ben waited until all transmissions were concluded, then stepped out of the alley and gave the men a full dose of .45-caliber medicine. Thirty rounds.

The Cadillac slewed to one side, the windshield a maze of pocked spiderwebs. It rolled up on the curb, banged into a storefront, then died in a gush of steam from the ruptured radiator.