Ash: Rise of the Republic by Campbell Paul Young Page B

and they waited.
    On their own and in small groups, more
desperate ragged men trickled in. The Chief sent out raiding
parties every few days. The countryside was ripe with prosperous
homesteaders. Mountains of food and liquor and finery piled up, but
always the Chief sent them out for more.
    They ran an old hermit to ground one day. He
dressed in ancient army fatigues, his shack was well hidden and
surrounded by booby-traps. A dozen men were horribly wounded in the
assault. When they had smoked him out and tied him up they tortured
him for two days. They spitted him over a smoky fire and turned him
slowly. Before he died he gave up his stash.
    The bunker was hidden well. It was probably
an old shipping container, buried at great expense by the old
survivalist long before the pillar. When they had finally cut
through the steel door and climbed down into the darkness they had
whooped and slapped each other’s backs. Racks and racks of rifles
and machine guns lined the walls, boxes and belts of ammunition
were piled all around. The Chief was summoned. He was pleased.
    ****
    The helicopter ride was a thrill for the young
rangers. None of them had even seen the creaking, sputtering
machines fly before. The elite troop usually tried to portray an
aura of mystery and savagery when they were around other soldiers,
but the novelty of flight had pulled smiles across their faces. The
aircrew, only a few years older themselves, noticed their delight
and sprouted smiles as well. A few minutes into the flight the
business-like transport helicopter was suddenly filled with
laughing and joking young men and women. They pushed aside the fact
that they would soon be embroiled in a savage war and enjoyed
themselves.
    The Captain and his wife seemed unimpressed
with the transportation. They were members of a generation which
once considered convenient air travel a fundamental right. They sat
to the side and left the youngsters to their fun.
    Despite their apparent indifference, the two
old rangers knew that air transport was now a rare thing. Volcanic
ash is extremely intrusive and abrasive. It plays hell with any
engine, but it can choke up and rip apart a jet turbine in minutes.
In the panic after the pillar, civil and military authorities alike
foolishly took to the skies as if it were any other natural
disaster. There were dozens of crashes that first week. Airliners,
news helicopters, and fighter jets were falling out of the sky all
over the country. It was rumored that the President and a number of
other top government and military leaders lost their lives in the
fiery crashes.
    Now, after years of poor maintenance and
exposure to ash, there were very few working aircraft left. The two
transport helicopters in the RNT Air force had been cobbled
together from a dozen rusting hulks. The two veterans glanced at
each other nervously each time the aging machine shuddered or
coughed, knowing it could drop out of the sky any minute.
    Miraculously, the hour long flight passed
without any serious injury. Legs gave a triumphant shout when,
peering out through the front windscreen, he caught the first
glimpse of the stadium on the horizon. His comrades, still in a
playful mood, clapped him on the back and broke out into the school
fight song. The Captain and Deb, both graduates of the University,
had taught them the old song one night. The troop had adopted it
immediately. They clung to anything that set them apart from the
regular guard troops. They were elite, and the strange words and
references in the song added to their mystery.
    As they approached, the Captain gazed down
at what he had helped to build. The University was the greatest
collection of new and surviving technology in a thousand miles or
more. Visitors from the rest of the country were few, but he had
yet to meet one who had not been awed by the impressive collection
of industry and research facilities. Nowhere else had so much
success been scraped out of the ash.
    In the early days