The Last Rebel: Survivor (2 page)

On the other hand, this was a special circumstance, and in a pragmatic sense Jim had done it before. He had taken his golden retriever-shepherd “King” with him and there had been no problem at all, because the dog remained quiet and suppressed his exploratory nature.

Immediately after Jim had decided to take Reb with him he started to feel, in general, a little better. Reb had acknowledged Jim as the alpha or leader of the pack, as all dogs will to the most dominant member of their packs, and they were getting along very well. Moreover, Jim enjoyed just occasionally looking at Reb, lying on a blanket on the floor on the passenger side. And every time—every time—he did it, Reb would look up and get his tail going. And the times they stopped in the park had proved no problem at all. Jim said, “Stay,” and Reb stayed.

Now, Jim climbed into the HumVee, which was parked on the street heading east, and Reb took his customary spot.

“Ready, Reb?” Jim said. “Let’s roll.”

Jim fired up the HumVee and they pulled out. As he went, he thought that he hoped it would be the last time he would see the plague in action. Maybe he would get lucky. And maybe he would be lucky enough to avoid marauders, which was what he had encountered shortly after meeting General Ben Raines. Some marauders had attacked him and a badly weakened General Raines, and Jim and the general had killed them quickly.

Marauders were the reason Jim had tried to stick to the back roads: the possibility of more of them showing up. Finding back roads was made very much easier with military maps he found in the glove compartment, though he had gotten lost once. The maps were highly detailed. He had read somewhere a quote of General Raines that he couldn’t help but recall when he had discovered the maps:
Wars are won with men and material
, Raines had said,
but maybe the greatest asset is information
.

These maps, Jim thought, did nothing to deny that statement.

The only bad thing about back roads was a lack of service stations. Jim had found around twenty so far. All had been abandoned. The problem with the HumVee was that it was an oat burner. Jim figured he was averaging only about six miles a gallon, and the tank held twenty-five gallons. To ensure that he didn’t get stuck on some back road, he filled up the five-gallon containers that Raines had set up side by side in the bed of the vehicle.

Occasionally, he would have to travel a main road or highway until he found one. These were all abandoned as well, but they had gas. The plague had drastically cut down on the number of customers.

When he did stop, he brought the weapons he had out from under the front seat and laid them on the passenger seat, fully loaded. Ready to go.

Jim was great with a rifle and a pistol. He had been shooting since he was ten years old and he had never missed hitting his target, whether it be stationary or moving. But he had never used automatic weapons, nor had the experience—until he was with General Raines—of firing them with someone firing back. Jim was thankful now for what his older brother, Ray, had taught him about guns. Thanks to Ray he had a good idea what automatic weapons were all about. Ray was surely a good teacher with a lot of experience. He had fought in two wars.

Included in Jim’s inventory were a variety of handguns and two AK-47s, which Ray told him had been produced in larger numbers than any other rifle. Ray said that though precise figures weren’t available, it was estimated that over twelve million were made, and more were being made. The AK-47, popularly known as the Kalashnikov, actually had come out of research first developed by the Germans, finding that most combat situations involved fights at four hundred meters or less, so a new cartridge, a Soviet 7.62-by-39mm cartridge had been developed. A so-called assault rifle, it could fire its relatively low-powered ammunition—low-powered compared to conventional rifle ammunition—either on single shot or fully automatic to a maximum effective combat range of around four hundred meters. “It’s a great weapon in an assault situation,” Ray had said, “because you can use it single shot or automatic. It uses thirty-bullet clips, and it’s the kind of gun that’s easy to field-strip and can take a lot of kicking and keep on ticking.”

Apparently so. It was the weapon of choice of guerilla armies all over the world.

Yes, Jim, thought, but he never wanted to have to use it except to protect himself. Jim hated war. Ray had carried automatic weapons, and had gone to those wars, and now his thirty-five-year-old body lay in a plot in David Rook Rural Cemetery near Jaynesville. Jim’s father had been in another war, and he knew about guns too. And he had also lost his life in combat. He had died of shrapnel wounds at the ripe old age of thirty-three, and Jim’s mother shortly thereafter of cancer, so Jim had been raised by his grandfather and Ray, until he died too.

There had to be a better way, Jim thought, to work things out with other people than to try to kill each other. He had read about war, and many times the reasons for the war were unclear. You needed a real clear reason to die. He was not about to die for some fuzzy political principle, or to grab some land that didn’t amount to a hill of crap. He remembered he had read once about McNamara, who had been secretary of defense during the Vietnam War, crying years after the fact because he later knew he was wrong for sending all those innocent boys to their deaths.

That was a bunch of woodpecker crap. No way would he fight for that.

Ben Rainses sounded like he had the right idea, but Jim would not have been willing to fight any wars for him either. You lost your father and your brother in war and it tended to turn you off on it. Way off. Talk it out. Talk it through. People had done that. There had been many wars, true. But many wars had been avoided because people gave in to each other.

In addition to the AK-47, Jim also had an old-fashioned Thompson submachine, or tommy gun, which Ray had explained was the “weapon of choice of gangsters,” but eventually it became great and popular when modified for use in World War II, a formidable weapon that was not that easy to handle but could fire six hundred rounds a minute. Jim knew this was a favorite of General Raines and Jim had used it to dispatch two of four marauders he met while he was with Raines.

Above all, Jim liked the Glock handgun, which was light, 9mm, and held sixteen shots. He had heard the story of why the New York City Police Department carried these pistols—because of a death. One NYPD officer had been in a Shootout with a perp and the cop was using a six-shot .38 while the bad guy was using a 9mm. When the bad guy knew that the cop had used up all his ammunition—he’d counted six shots—he just walked up and put two bullets in the twenty-three-year-old cop’s head—and had five left in the clip.

Jim withdrew a cigarette paper from his jacket pocket, folded it like a little trough with his fingers, then used the other hand to sprinkle on and tamp down some Prince Albert tobacco. He rolled the cigarette closed, licked it, popped it in his mouth, and lit it with a Zippo lighter.

He took a deep drag and focused inward. He smiled. For a moment he got an image that was straight out of a movie. A wonderful movie. He could see himself, knee deep in rapidly running water that was so clear that he could see the pebble-covered creek bed almost as clearly as if the water wasn’t there, and then flicking his wrist to make a fly sail out on the end of his fishing line, there to make a little splash and wait for one of the fat trout that, hopefully, would get a hankering for the fly bobbing above him on the silvery water.

He knew he could he could live indefinitely in the wild, and in harmony with everything from bears to marmots. His grandfather had once said, “Jimmy boy, you know the wild so well I sometimes think you were born part wolf.”

The relatively narrow road was flanked by evergreens, and Jim knew that this was an ideal situation. The trees provided great cover though he knew that many parts of Wyoming, which he had traveled through extensively while still living in Idaho, were not forested. Besides its spectacular mountain ranges, much of it was desert, and most of it was covered with various kinds of sagebrush, which provided zero cover when you were traveling by vehicle, particularly a camouflage-painted HumVee.

His route was typical backcountry road, mile after mile of forest; occasionally he could see a house through the veil of trees. So far, he thought, so good. His mood, he sensed, had gotten just a little better. It wasn’t a square dance on Saturday night in Jaynesville but it was better than it had been.

Most of the road was straight, but of course some was curved, and as he came around one curve he got a surprise that put him on full alert.

The road was blocked by a barricade. It looked like a steel I-beam had been placed across the road, the ends of the beams housed in some sort of sawhorse arrangement about four feet above the ground. But that wasn’t the only thing barring passing. There were six men all wearing khaki uniforms, all wearing the same short beards, albeit different colors, and red berets. And armed to the teeth. Four of the men looked like they had shotguns, and two Kalashnikovs. They also had holstered handguns and belts of grenades.

Jim slowed the HumVee and then stopped but kept the engine idling. Just like he had done when he was hunting game, he started to calculate what he would do if they would, in effect, charge—started to fire on him. There wasn’t much he could do. The firepower they were toting would make Swiss cheese of the HumVee, and him, in short order and maybe turn it into a fireball, this thanks to the gas cans he had stored in back.

And if he wanted to make his butt scarce, he couldn’t do that either. There was no room to turn. If he wanted to move out, all he could do was throw it in reverse and put the pedal to the metal.

Then two of the men, both muscular, maybe in their thirties, one tall, the other short, starting walking toward him, each carrying his gun at port arms. They did not seem threatening, but one never knew. Jim pulled the Glock, which was on the passenger seat in a holster, flicked the holster out of sight near Reb, and pushed the gun under his right thigh. Then a plan hit him. He was very conscious that he had a loaded, thirty-cartridge AK-47 under his seat. If the men were hostile and drew down on him he would shoot first one and then the other in the head, and bolt out of the Hummer, using it for cover, hopefully before the other four men made mincemeat of him with their weapons.

Then something glittering on their chests caught Jim’s eye. He saw something he hadn’t noticed because of the grenades. Each had silver medallions held by silver chains hanging from their necks. The medallions were maybe three inches in diameter, and inside the circular edge was a cross, the ages-old symbol of Jesus Christ, a modern depiction of the crucifixion.

The tall man looked at Jim with narrow blue eyes.

“What do you want here?” the man demanded.

“Just passing through,” Jim replied. “Heading east.”

The man’s eyes narrowed to the point where they were just about slits. Jim tried to read what was in them, but couldn’t. The other man’s hazel eyes were blank.

“Everything east of here,” Slit Eyes said, “is known as the Zone, stranger. It’s no-man’s land.”

“Why is this so special?”

The shorter man stepped forward.

“Are you a Christian?”

That was, Jim thought, none of their business. But if he didn’t answer he didn’t know if it would lead to violence. He decided to answer, but he also wondered if he should tell the man that he was born Catholic though, in truth, he hadn’t been to Mass or confession in more years than he could recall. Churches were few and far between in Idaho’s wilderness. Still, he felt that he and his family had lived a Christian life. But something inside would not let him go into all this. His attitude was accommodating—to a point.

“I believe in God, yes. Why do you ask?”

“Them folks in the Zone—that’s what we call it—don’t,” the man replied.

Jim stared at the man for a moment, then shrugged, and said quietly, “Well, so what?”

The man nodded slowly, his eyebrows arched a little.

“You’ll find out, fella,” he said. “You go in there and you’ll sure find out. We’re suggesting you don’t.”

“I’ll be okay,” Jim said.

The man backed away, apparently a signal that Jim would be allowed to pass.

“Go on,” the man said. “Just don’t say we didn’t warn you.”

The man waved and the two of the other four men went over and swung the big I-beam out of the way.

Jim put the HumVee in gear and drove forward slowly, very conscious of the Glock under his haunch. As he passed the other men, he noticed their expressions. They were looking at him as if he were a steer going into a slaughterhouse. And then, twenty or so yards beyond them, he glanced in the rearview mirror still wary that this might be some sort of trick, that they were going to open up on him. But he saw only one action: one of the men was making the sign of the cross.

TWO

The so-called Zone did not seem dangerous to Jim. It was very ordinary. Just mile after mile of evergreen forest, an occasional home spotted through the trees, and a few times some animals. Once he had seen an elk, another time a buck deer, and another—the treat of the ride so far—a black bear sow and two teddy-bear-size cubs trailing after her. And once he had a close call—or the skunk did—when Jim narrowly missed turning it into roadkill which he did not need, with what he had put his nose through already.