William W. Johnstone - Ashes 04 - Blood in the Ashes

VIP免费

2024-12-20 0 0 879.58KB 447 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Blood in the Ashes

Ashes 04

William W. Johnstone

To: Charles and Bobbi

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain

a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty

nor safety.

Ben Franklin

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free,

in a state of civilization, it expects what never

was and never will be.

Thomas Jefferson

PROLOGUE

The bullet spider-webbed the windshield and

knocked a hole in the interior of the truck before

exiting out the rear of the cab. Gale screamed and

ducked to the floorboards, her hands over her ears.

She said some very unladylike words, just audible over

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

the rattle of gunfire.

From the direction the slug took in entering the cab

of the pickup, Ben knew it had been fired from his

right, from the south side of the highway. Ben spun the

steering wheel.

A six-wheeled V-300 roared up beside Ben's

pickup. It passed the truck and wheeled about in the

cracked and pitted highway, its twin Browning

M2 .50-caliber machine guns yammering,

spitting out death, clearing the thick underbrush by the

roadside of all living things. An APC had

rolled up beside Ben's pickup, on the south side,

a buffer of protection for the general and his lady.

Rebels sprang into action. They were

Gray's Scouts, and they knew their jobs, performing

without any wasted motion. Small arms fire

rattled over the thick timber.

A few screams were heard. Then a quiet

settled over the area. The screaming ceased.

Ben's radio crackled. "All clear, sir.

We got them all."

"Stay in the truck, sir," Colonel Dan

Gray said, appearing by the driver's side of the

pickup. "I've got teams working the north side

of the highway." Gunfire came from the north side.

"I suspected as much. Very sloppy ambush. Not

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

professional at all."

Ben smiled. Dan was an expert at ambush.

"Who were they, Dan?"

"Just another band of rabble and outlaws, sir," the

Englishman said quietly. He was very calm. This was

his job. "More and more of them appearing as conditions

continue to deteriorate. I think it's going to get

much worse."

"Yes," Ben agreed.

"We're under attack and you guys sit there

discussing fucking politics, for Christ's sake,"

Gale said, crawling back on the seat. "What a

bunch of characters." She looked down at Ben.

"I'm hungry."

"She's pregnant," Ben explained.

"Yes, sir," Dan said blandly.

"It's a desperate time, Dan," Ben said.

"What's left of the nation is reeling, with no

direction, no leadership, no organization. The

scum of humanity is surfacing."

Dan smiled. "Quite, sir. A strong man needs

to take over."

BOOK ONE

CHAPTER ONE

The long convoy bivouacked betweenLebanon and

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

Cookeville,Tennessee, near a small town

namedBuffaloValley . It was a dead town, with

no sign of any living beings. Only the scattered

bones in the streets gave testimony to that which once

was.

Many of the towns the convoy had either driven through or

bypassed on the interstate appeared dead, but Ben

had detected a definite air of hope in the men and

women and children in the long column that had snaked and

threaded and picked its way from southernMissouri .

Other columns were on their way to northGeorgia ,

coming fromLouisiana andArkansas .

Yet another move for Raines'

Rebels.

Hopefully, Ben thought, as he lay beside Gale

in their tent, the last move.

But as he lay waiting for sleep to take him,

Ben pondered over what he considered to be the somewhat

mysterious behavior he had detected from his close

circle of friends: Ike, Cecil, Doctor

Chase, Juan, Mark and Colonel Gray.

Something was in the wind. But what?

"Are you asleep?" he whispered to Gale.

Silence from her side of the double sleeping bag.

But her breathing had changed. Ben knew she was

awake.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

"I asked if you were asleep," Ben persisted.

She sighed, turning to face him, dark eyes shining

in the dim light filtering through the open flap of the

tent. "I was," she said sarcastically.

"Despite your tossing and turning and snorting like a

water buffalo."

"I do not snort like a water buffalo! Have you ever

seen a water buffalo?"

"What's that got to do with it? Ben,

what

do you

want?"

"Do you get the impression that Dan and his people are

becoming a bit overprotective lately?"

"You woke me up to ask me that? Good God! And

I was having such a nice dream. Do you wanna hear

about it?"

"No. I am not in the least interested in hearing about

your slumber-time sexual fantasies. Just answer

the question."

"Sexual fantasies! I was dreaming about a

hot roast beef sandwich, with mashed potatoes and

lots of gravy. How in the hell can you make

anything sexual about that?"

"Just answer the question."

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

"Yes, master. They're just trying to keep you

alive, that's all. You're such a klutz."

Ben smiled in the darkness. "Wanna play?"

She looked at her watch. "At two o'clock in the

morning?"

"Well, there is that old saying. I forgot about

that."

"What old saying?"

"Warmed up coffee and woke up pussy."

"Good God! How crude." She rolled over and

went back to sleep. But she was smiling.

Ben thought: I wonder if she knows more

than she's telling? Whatever

is, maybe she's in on it, too? Damn! What

I don't need is a mystery. Not at this time.

He put his arms around her and she turned to face

him.

"He's not going to like it," Juan Solis said.

"I can tell you all that right up front."

The group of men were meeting not far from the main

bivouac area. Dan Gray, Cecil Jefferys,

Juan Solis, Mark Terry, Ike McGowen,

Doctor Chase.

"I think he'll see his way to do it," Ike

said. "Once we lay it out for him. But Ben's

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

gonna take off for a while before he does it. He

wants some time alone on the road."

"He said it himself," Dan said. "This morning after

the firefight. "The nation is leaderless, with no

direction, no organization.""

"Ben is tired," Dr. Lamar Chase said.

"Not to imply his health is bad," he quickly added,

catching the alarmed looks on the faces of the men around

him, "for he's in better physical shape than

most men fifteen years younger. He's just tired.

Good God, people, the man has been building

and rebuilding

nations

for more than a decade. That would tell on a god.

And he's worried about many of these new people that have joined

us. And I am too."

"Yes," Cecil spoke. "Ben has talked with

me about them. Captain Willette and his bunch

especially. We

have no way of checking their stories, no way of

knowing where their true loyalties really lie. Ben

is leery of many of them. But they've done nothing out of

line."

Ike said, "I'm with Ben about these new people. Some

of them rub my fur the wrong way. I get the

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

same feeling I had back in '88, just before the

balloon went up."

"All we can do is keep an eye on them,"

Juan said.

"We'd better," Mark said. "You all notice

how they're singling out the younger troops to talk with? I

don't like that. I get the feeling something ... evil

is in the wind."

"I'm with you, partner," Ike said.

"When do we tell Ben?" Dan asked.

Ike looked at him. "When we get

toGeorgia . No point in gettin' him all

stirred up now."

Ben experienced a form of mild depression as his

eyes swept the land on either side of Interstate

24. The scene greeting him was one of almost total

deterioration. Ben knew living beings were out there,

knew many had survived not only the bombings of

'88, but also the plague and the horror that followed a

decade later. But the survivors did not appear

to be

doing

anything.

Ben thought: How in the hell do these people expect

to pull anything out of the ashes of destruction and

despair if they just sit on their butts and do

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

nothing?

Gale glanced at him. As if reading his thoughts,

she said, "They don't have a leader, Ben. Someone

to put their faith and trust in."

Ben shook his head. "Uh-huh, and hell, no,

lady. Not again. Not this ol' boy. I've had my

shot at running the show."

"Then why are we moving to Georgia, Ben?" she

challenged him. "Just to see the countryside?"

"It's one thing to build a small

following of people, Gale. It is quite another to try

to pull together an entire nation. I thank you, but no

thank you."

She thought about that. She stuck out her chin. "You

did it before," she reminded him.

"No," Ben contradicted her. "I

attempted

to do it. And for a very brief time, if you are speaking of

my short tenure as president of this battered

nation."

"Ben-was

"No, Gale. No. Another Tri-States,

perhaps, something on that order. Perhaps, Gale, if

I-we-could do that, and make it work, then others would

follow our example. That is my hope. But only

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

time will tell."

"All right, Ben." She knew that particular

subject was, for the time being, closed. She gazed out

the window. Nothing moved, no sign of human

habitation, much less human progress toward

rebuilding. "It just looks so ... barren, Ben."

"It is, to some degree. But it's a dangerous

illusion, Gale. I think many of the survivors have

formed pockets of defense around the nation.

Probably many have slipped back to the

medieval fortressstvillage type of existence."

"This nation-or what is left of it-put people on the

moon. We were reaching for the stars. Now-this."

"It was inevitable, Gale. All people had to do was

study history to find out where any nation is heading.

Unfortunately, most people were too busy protesting this

or that-whatever served their own special interest group

or union-or were too busy glued to a television

set watching the most asinine pap ever made for

insulting the human intelligence. In short, the

majority didn't give a shit."

"That's harsh, Ben. Perhaps too harsh."

"I don't think so. It isn't too harsh for me

to say the nation's morals slipped to zero. It

certainly is correct to say in our courts it

became not a matter of guilty or innocent, but

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

BloodintheAshes Ashes04 WilliamW.Johnstone To:CharlesandBobbi Theythatcangiveupessentiallibertytoobtainalittletemporarysafetydeserveneitherlibertynorsafety. BenFranklin Ifanationexpectstobeignorantandfree,inastateofcivilization,itexpectswhatneverwasandneverwillbe. ThomasJefferson PROLOGUE Thebull...

展开>> 收起<<

William W. Johnstone - Ashes 04 - Blood in the Ashes.pdf

共447页,预览90页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

William W. Johnstone - Ashes 04 - Blood in the Ashes

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: