"Nyet!"
Georgi Striganov said."No," Cecil said.
"No," West said.
Thermopolis shook his head. "No."
The commanders of Seven and Eight Battalions shook their heads.
Buddy and Tina appeared in the doorway of the CP. Both of them wore odd expressions on their faces.
"What"s the matter with you two?" Ben asked.
"It appears that we all misunderstood what the creepie meant by surrender" Buddy said.
"What are you talking about?" Ike asked.
"There are no more of them," Tina said. "At least not in this city. He"s the last one left."
Chapter Ten.
"What the h.e.l.l am I going to do with you?" Ben asked the Believer.
"What difference does it make?" the ragged man asked. ""The mighty General Ben Raines and his army of Rebels have won-at least here in the remnants of America. Europe, my good general, will be quite another matter, I a.s.sure you."
"I don"t suppose you"d like to tell me what you know about it?"
"Ah ... no."
"Why did you surrender?"
"To receive proper medical treatment. I am sick."
"Yes. We know. You"re probably dying."
"I suspected as much. I contracted the disease while visiting friends down in San Diego."
"San Diego no longer exists."
"I know. You"re a vicious man, General." He reached around and scratched his b.u.t.t for the umpteenth time, and Ben"s eyes followed the movement.
Lamar grunted his astonishment at that remark and Ben laughed at the man.
"allyou call me vicious?"
"We were exercising our right to practice our religion. What gives you the right to wage war against us?"
"I don"t think our Founding Fathers had cannibalism in mind when they wrote the First Amendment."
"No matter. Are you going to kill me, General Raines?"
"I don"t know what I"m going to do with you."
He reached around to scratch his b.u.t.t. With a smile on his face he said, "Good-bye General Raines."
The booming of Ben"s .45 was very loud in the closed room. The slug took the creep in the center of his forehead and when it exited, made a big mess on the wall behind where the creep had been sitting.
"What the h.e.l.l, Ben!" Lamar shouted.
"Ten bucks says he had a grenade wedged in the crack of his a.s.s," Ben said, easing the hammer back down on his .45.Ike and Dan turned the creep over and jerked up his ragged robes. "How did you know?" Dan asked softly.
"He scratched his b.u.t.t one time too many."
"I can"t believe it"s over here," Linda said.
"It just doesn"t seem possible."
"He may or may not have been the last creepie,"
Ben replied. "I think he was sent here on a suicide mission. But I also believe there are d.a.m.n few of them left."
"General," Corrie said, walking up behind him.
"Five and Six Battalions report everything is clean all the way up to the Canadian border.
Their recon people have found where large numbers of men have bivouacked. They followed their trail straight to the border. They want to know if you want them to cross over and engage."
"Tell them to stand down and go on back to Base Camp One. They"ve earned the break. They"ve been on the road for two months." He paused.
"What month is it, anyway?"
"November," Jersey said. "It"s almost Thanksgiving, I think."
"One week from today," Beth, the unofficial record-keeper said.
"Thank you, Beth," Ben said. "We"ll pull out six days from today. We"ll have Thanksgiving dinner on the road. For the next six days we"ll break up into platoon-sized units and sweep the city.
It looks dead, it feels dead, but let"s make sure. I don"t want any more surprises sprung on me."
The Rebels fanned out all over the smoking and rubbled ruins of the City of the Angels. If any building they came to was still intact, they either blew it or burned it. When the Rebels left the city this time, there would be precious little left. They found very small pockets of creepies, and the creepies had anything but surrender on their minds.
It wouldn"t have done them any good if they had chosen to surrender.
Ben and his team, accompanied by a platoon of Rebels, roamed the city, inspecting what used to be called-by the tourist board compoints of interest. The tall buildings of downtown Los Angeles still stood, but they were shattered and torn from artillery and mortar rounds, huge gaping holes knocked in them from 105 and 155 artillery rounds.
"Bring them down," Ben told his demolition people.
The destruction of the city was in its final stages.
Ben personally inspected the city"s museums and waves of disgust swept him at what he found.
Priceless and precious works of art had been wantonly destroyed by the punks. Paintings had been slashed for no apparent reason-other than ignorance. They lay on the littered floors, amid the other rat-chewed objects.
"Can they be restored?" Jersey asked.
"We"ll try," Ben told her.
The Los Angeles Zoo had lain in ruins foryears. "They let the animals starve," Beth said, looking at the skeletal remains of the long dead captives.
"You maybe expected compa.s.sion from punks?" Coop asked her.
"What is all this?" Jersey asked, as they stood amid the ruins of the Chinese Theatre"s Forecourt.
"Bob Hope"s nose, Betty Grable"s legs, and John Wayne"s fist" Ben told her, looking down at the impressions in the cement. "It was a gentler time."
"Must have been nice" Beth lamented softly. "I can just remember when there wasn"t war. I remember sitting in front of the TV set on Sat.u.r.day mornings, watching the cartoons." She shook her head and said, "A long time ago and never to return."
The team drove on.
At the Hollywood Wax Museum, little was left of the hundreds of mannequins that had once stood still and silent, watching the viewers as they pa.s.sed Jersey picked up a head and looked at it. "A movie star" Ben said. "I can"t even remember her name."
The team inspected the fossil pits and walked through what was left of Dodger Stadium. Little Tokyo lay in ruins, still smoking from the fires that had ravaged it.
At Union Station, they hit trouble.
"I smell them," Ben said softly. "Hit the deck."
The rattle of gunfire echoed around the huge terminal, the lead whistling and whining in ricochet. The battle was brief, b.l.o.o.d.y, and deadly.
Ben stood over a dying creepie, his belly bullet-shattered, glaring up at him through eyes that shone with hate. "You"ve killed me!" he gasped.
"That"s the general idea" Ben told him.
Ben took his people and prowled carefully through what was left of the University of Southern California.
Huge piles were all that was left after the punks and the creepies had burned all the books.
"Disgusting," Ben said. "Ignorant a.s.sholes."
"The buildings?" Buddy asked.
"Bring them down."
The top floors were gone from what was once the twenty-eight-story City Hall. The Rebels inspected what floors remained and were considered to be structurally safe. Here, a ma.s.s suicide had taken place, with more than a hundred bodies of creepies stinking in self-imposed death.
With a bandanna covering his mouth and nose, Ben said, "Bring it down."
Back on the street, Jersey said, "I don"t like cities. They"re too cold, too impersonal."
"This one won"t be much longer," Coop declared.
On the fourth day, the commanders began calling in.
"There are no signs of life in my sector," was each one"s report."Corrie" Ben said. "Order all Rebels out of the city. When that is done, I want planes equipped with heat-seekers to make flybys. Do it systematically and do it right."
The Rebels pulled back to the edges of the city, north and east, and waited.
Ben studied the reports as they came in. The heat-seekers showed very small concentrations of warm, breathing bodies in a few locations. He handed the reports to West.
"Flush them out and destroy them."
On Thanksgiving Day, the mercenary reported back. "Done," he said.
"Corrie, order the pilots up again and sweep it."
When those reports came in, Ben read the graphs, folded them, and put them in a briefcase. "It"s a dead city."
Chapter Eleven.
To a person, the Rebels experienced a let-down feeling. A depression that was hard to explain and even harder to shake. Many stood on the high ground, miles from the ruined city, and stared at the smoke that still rose in narrow plumes. And many thought the same thought: When future generations read about this, how will they view us?
"Many will condemn us for it," Ben said. "But they will know only that we did it. They won"t be able to understand why we did it, because they were not of this time. Some will view us as heroes, some will write that we were thugs and villains. Others will say that we were tyrants and twenty-first-century pirates. And a few will defend what we did. But I want you all to remember this: We did what we had to do, with what we had to do it with. And if future historians don"t understand that, then they can all kiss my a.s.s."
"Right on!" Emil shouted from out of the crowd which had gathered around. "Those who will write about us in the years to come aren"t here to bury the dead or smell the stink of battle. So what the h.e.l.l do they know about it?"
Ben smiled at the small man. "That"s right, Emil. You"re absolutely right. Everybody ready to get the h.e.l.l gone from this place?"
A chorus of cheers went up at that.
"Pack it up, then. Let"s go see some country!"
It took the Rebels several days to get everything road-ready. It was the first week in December when they were all ready to go. Ben stood on a rise and looked toward the long columns of Rebel freedom fighters. All faiths, all nationalities, all coming together to fight for the most precious thing on earth. Freedom.
The column stretched out on the Interstate for miles. And Ben could easily see why the sight of the Rebels struck fear in some hearts and hope in others. The Rebels not only looked awesome, they were awesome.He lifted his eyes toward the ruins of Los Angeles. A low haze of smoke hung over the rubble of the city. What had once been the two largest cities in America, New York City and Los Angeles, were now destroyed, and with their pa.s.sing had come the end of the cannibalistic cult called the Believers. Ben knew there were a few Believers left, hiding in holes in the ground and in dank, evil-smelling bas.e.m.e.nts. But the backs and the spirits of those remaining had been broken. They would never again rise to such prominence as they had once enjoyed.
"Scouts out?" Ben asked Corrie.