Out of the Ashes by William W. Johnstone Page B

jammed on the brakes, sliding to a halt.
    That was a body in the ditch.
    He got out of his truck and, stepping over the water (when had it rained?), walked to the ditch and knelt by the man. The man had been dead at least a week; his corpse was blackened and stinking.
    He walked back to his truck and flipped on the CB radio. “Give me a Montgomery Parish Deputy or a state trooper.”
    Nothing.
    He repeated his call and received the same scratchy emptiness from the speaker.
    His CB was a good one and he had had it on ... a couple of days before the wasps hit him.
    â€œBreak-one-nine for a radio check,” he said.
    Nothing.
    He monitored all channels and received the same on all of them. Nothing.
    He sat in his truck for a moment, reviewing what he could remember of the past week, before he was stung. He had been shopping, was it Wednesday or Thursday? Had he listened to a radio or TV since. No, not since the night he had gotten drunk listening to the TV newspeople flap their gums about nuclear war.
    Ben looked around him, at the clear day, sunny and bright. Obviously, no nuclear war had occurred. He suddenly felt uneasy. Or, had it? When had he heard those horns honking so frantically? He shook his head. Kids, probably, cutting up.
    He glanced at the body in the ditch and then at his watch. Almost noon. “Well, this is silly!” he said. “There is something wrong with my radio, that’s all.”
    Then he thought about the radio in his truck. He turned it on, tuning in to the local station first. Nothing.
    He punched all the preset buttons. Nothing. He spun the dial left to right, then went slowly back.
    Nothing.
    A finger of something very close to fear touched him. He shook it off. But something deep within him, some ... sense of warning prompted him to punch open the glove compartment and take out the .38 special he always carried. Ben had blatantly ignored the government order to turn in all handguns, as, he suspected, had several million others. Ben despised Sen. Hilton Logan and everything he stood for. Logan was a dove—Ben was a hawk. Logan was a liberal—Ben was a conservative. A conservative in most of his thinking.
    He checked the cylinder of the .38. All full. He shoved the pistol behind his belt and put the truck in gear. He had not recognized the dead man.
    A mile further and he turned onto the road that was just inside the city limits. A half-mile further, on the edge of town, in an open field, Ben slowed to watch several large birds, vultures, rise from the ground at the sound of his truck. They flapped ponderously away. Full and heavy. Ben had only to glance quickly to see what they had been feeding upon: bodies.
    This time it was fear that touched him—open, naked fear. “Did the balloon go up?” he asked aloud. “If so, why was I spared?”
    He could not answer his question.
    He drove on until he could drive no further. Two cars were blocking the street. Ben did not have to get out of his truck to see that the occupants’ bodies were blackened and decomposing in death.
    He backed up, turned around, and drove down a side street until he came to a residential area. He saw no signs of human life, but neither did he see any bodies. He wound his way to the service station and pulled into the drive. There, Ben sat in numb silence, staring at the windows of the Exxon station. The windows were smashed, broken; glass littered the drive. The body of his friend lay sprawled half in, half out of the door.
    Ben got out of his truck slowly, not really believing all this was happening—had happened. He corrected his thinking. He knelt down beside the man. Mr. Harnack was stiff and black and stinking. Dogs had gnawed on him.
    Ben stepped over the body and walked to the phone. He punched out the numbers of the police department, letting the phone ring twenty times. No answer. He called the sheriffs department. Same results.
    Ben felt the butt of the .38, and the