All heads looked up at the small figure, looking down at them. Even at that distance, she looked worn out.
“Who are you?” Ben called.
“Nancy Brinkerhoff. Sam Hartline tortured me, then ordered me taken to where the mutants gather. They stripped me naked and tied me to a tree, but I managed to get free. I’ve been running and hiding ever since. The mutants cornered me in this town. They’re all around here, hiding, watching, waiting.” There was a note of hysteria in her voice.
“Just calm down, miss,” Ben called. “You’re all right, now. You’re among friends. Let us handle the mutants. Come on down.”
“Who are you?” she called.
“Ben Raines.”
She began weeping and pointing.
The mutants erupted from the empty stores, screaming and howling in rage and hate. Many of them wielded sticks and clubs and crude spears, sharpened on one end. The stench of them was hideous, almost as much as their grotesque appearance was appalling to the stunned Rebels.
Ben was the first to react.
Leveling his Thompson, he pulled the trigger, holding it back. The stream of heavy .45-caliber slugs knocked the front line of mutants sprawling, blood and hair and bits of bone and guts and brain splattered against the brick of the buildings.
The Rebels reacted just a split-second after Ben fired. The fire-fight was very short, with only one Rebel wounded. He took a spear in his leg. Dead and dying mutants littered the sidewalk and street. Blood pumped from their deformed bodies and leaked into the gutters, clogged from years of leaves and rags.
“Let them rot,” Ben ordered the Rebels, his voice strong in the shocked silence that always follows heavy gunfire. “Get Miss Brinkerhoff and let’s get the hell out of here.”
The brigade was stopped for the night in Cabool, Missouri, some sixteen miles northwest of Willow Springs. Nancy had been bathed and fed and dressed in clean clothing; Doctor Chase had examined her and cleaned and bandaged her cuts. She told her story.
She spoke of what Sam Hartline and his men had done to her. She was blunt, leaving nothing out.
“Those people are perverted beyond imagination,” she said. “I suppose I’m-was-very naive. But I can assure you-all of you-that was tortured out of me.”
“Where are you from?” Ben asked.
“Chicago, originally,” Nancy said. The marks of torture were still very evident on her face and arms. “But my family pulled out of there just after the bombings of 1988.” She looked square at Ben. “You know why, General?”
“Yes,” Ben said, “I know only too well. My brother was a part of that… madness.”
“You later killed your brother, did you not, General?” she asked.
“Yes,” Ben said softly, “I did. Back in Tri-States.”
How hated Ben’s system of government was did not come home to the people of the three states until late fall of the first year. Ben had stepped outside of his home for a breath of the cold, clean air of night. Juno went with him, and together they walked from the house around to the front yard. When Juno growled low in his throat, Ben went into a crouch, and that saved his life. Automatic-weapon fire spider-webbed the windshield of his pickup, the slugs hitting and ricocheting off the metal, sparking the night. Ben jerked open the door of the truck, punched open the glove box, and grabbed a pistol. He fired at a dark figure running across the yard, then at another. Both went down, screaming in pain.
A man stepped from the shadows of the house and opened fire just as Ben hit the ground. Lights were popping on up and down the street, men with rifles in
their hands appearing on the lawns.
Ben rose to one knee and felt a slug slam into his hip, knocking him to one side, spinning him around, the lead traveling down his leg, exiting just above his knee. He pulled himself up and leveled the 9mm, pumping three rounds into the dark shape by the side of the house. The man went down, the rifle dropping from his hands.
Ben pulled himself up, his leg and hip throbbing from the shock of the wounds. He leaned against the truck just as help reached him.
“Call the medics!” a neighbor shouted. “Governor’s been hit.”
“Help me over to that man,” Ben said. “He looks familiar.”
Standing over the fallen man, Ben could see where his shots had gone: two in the stomach, one in the chest. The man was blood-splattered and dying. He coughed and spat at Ben.
“Goddamned nigger-lovin” scum,” the dying man said. He closed his eyes, shivering in the convulsions of pain; then he died.
“God, Governor!” a man asked, “who is he?”
Salina came to Ben, putting her arms around him as the wailing of ambulances grew louder. “Do you know him, Ben?” she asked.
“I used to,” Ben’s reply was sad. “He was my brother.”
“That’s horrible, Ben,” Gale said. “Your own brother hated you enough to want to kill you?” “He was part of Jeb Fargo’s Nazi establishment outside
of Chicago,” Ben explained. “To this day, I don’t know why or how he changed so radically in his thinking.” He looked at Nancy. “You want to continue?”
“Yes,” she said. “My father took us-my mother, my sister, my brother-and went west, into Iowa. We settled in Waterloo. We survived,” she said it flatly. “But it sure wasn’t any fun doing so. Never enough to eat, cold and tired most of the time that first year or so. But it gradually got better as things began to settle down. My mother died in ‘93, my father died a year later. My older sister raised my brother and me. We lived through Logan’s … reign in office. My older sister always talked about heading out to Tri-States, but somehow we never did get around to doing that. Then Tri-States fell and after that the country seemed to fall apart. I was seventeen when … the troops invaded Tri-States.
“We got through the horror of Al Cody and VP Lowry and all that… awfulness, all the hate and the discontent. Somehow.
“One day my sister and my brother went out to look for food. I was sick and they didn’t want me to go “cause the weather was bad and I was just beginning to get better. I had pneumonia.” She sighed. “That was last year. They never came back. Then one day the rats came. I never saw anything-up to that point-so … so horrible in all my life. And I thought after having lived through the bombings and the roaming gangs of thugs and all that, I could handle anything. I must have a mental block about the rats, because I really can’t recall much about them. I know I panicked. I ran. I ran blindly. I don’t know how I survived, but I did. In a manner of speaking.”
Tears ran down the young woman’s face and Gale reached out to take her hand and hold it.
“I can’t ever have children. The IPF doctors … gave me a shot. Me, and hundreds-maybe thousands-of other women, and men, too. Orientals, Hispanics, blacks, Jews, Indians.” She wiped her eyes and shook her head. “There is some sort of armed resistance movement north of Interstate 70, General. That was why they were torturing me. Or so they said. I think those people just like to torture people. I know they do. I heard some of them say so. I saw … I saw several of the men masturbating while they watched me being tortured. They … they would stand in front of me, where I was strapped down, and … ejaculate in my face.”
When Gale looked at Ben, the rage of five thousand years was printed invisibly across her face. It seemed to say: Five thousand years of persecution is enough. This time, stop it forever.
“All right,” Ben said.
The other men and women gathered around looked at each other in confusion, not understanding what had just silently transpired between the man and woman.
Ben swung his eyes from Gale, returning them to Nancy as he saw her rub her arm. His arm picked up the numbers tattooed on her forearm. J-1107.