Meanwhile

The General had just gotten finished with his last briefing. His men had secured the town and had been given instructions for the next day. The select group would take the Black prisoners from the jail house and take them to the ditch. They would be killed quickly, put down, and then buried. They would bring the piece of heavy equipment back to town with them. He suspected that they would find other Black survivors and more ditches would have to be dug. The patrols would widen their search. White survivors would be sent to Savannah for processing and Rick would go there with them. He was keeping Carol here with him. He had kept his word and Rick could live, but that didn't mean that Rick was getting Carol back.

General Mason Summers loosened his tie and contemplated his evening. Carol had looked clean but he was making sure that there would be hot water for a shower for her before she was brought to his room. Clean clothes too, though she would have to do with a too large shirt until her clothes could be laundered. She would be hungry and they would eat together. She would recognize that he could provide for her in ways that Rick couldn't. Women were conscious of that whether they wanted to admit or not.

He would have some wine tonight on hand. His seduction of Carol was totally cliché and she would know that, but she was too smart not to know that he could do whatever he wanted with her. The appearance of seduction was only disguising the rape that was to come if she resisted him. Mason suspected that she knew the value of a well-timed submission. It was a survival technique for defenseless women. This world was not kind to women, but she was safer with him than out there with the Ricks of the world. Rick could not protect her from that pig Frank James or anyone else. Carol would start to appreciate that she was with a man who could keep her safe from the dangers of this world.

Allanvale was a nice little town and tomorrow they could look for a place to set up a farming settlement with its own contingent of soldiers to keep the dead from hurting the living and to keep the living from running off to greener pastures. Rick could settle down here and help run the place. He would be here from time to time to check things out but his home was in Savannah, and he had his boat docked there. He kept it loaded with supplies. Mason liked to have a way out in case things went wrong. He chuckled to himself; nothing was going wrong tonight.

He got up and his two guards rose with him. He could hear a boom in the distance followed by two more booms and he hurried down the stairs from the courtroom. It was quiet out there and there wasn't much light. He moved up the main street toward the motel but still unsure where he explosions were coming from.

The motel was in flames when he got there. The guards around Carol and Rick's room were dead. He ordered a soldier to open the door and then the blast killed that soldier. The dead at the motel were turning and it was all the way around a cluster fuck.

Later they figured out the Carol and Rick had escaped with help from at least three others. One had used a cross bow and two others had used swords or knives. Mason had made his soldiers stay up most of the night checking every house in the town. Every exit was blocked off so he thought that they must have had a hiding place in the town. They found nothing but learned that the Black prisoners had also been spirited away from the jail. Mason was furious. He stayed that night in the courthouse and planned his revenge on Allanvale County.

Carol had slipped through his fingers because he had thought that she and Rick were a lone couple and obviously they belonged to a bigger and well trained fighting group. They had slipped into this town and taken his prize away from him. He should be drinking wine and enjoying Carol tonight. Mason wasn't angry with Carol for taking off. It just showed that she was a woman worthy of him. He would find her someday and this time she wasn't getting away.

Mason was up early the next morning. A supply convoy would be here soon. He wanted to make sure that the patrols going out this morning were well supplied. He intended to fill that ditch with the bodies of the survivors of this place. He ate breakfast with his men at the high school and then came back to the courthouse to wait for the supply convoy.

The supply convoy was late and he sent a large patrol out to meet it thinking that some idiot had managed to get lost on a trip of less than eighty miles. The patrol came back in less than an hour with the news that the convoy had been ambushed and the soldiers were buried in a ditch alongside the road. There was general amazement that guerilla fighters would stop and dig a ditch to bury their enemy, but most had figured out that the ditch was already dug. The word got out that it had been dug for the Black survivors of Allanvale County.

Mason was in a staff meeting with his officers at the courthouse when the sound of rifle fire alerted them that they were being attacked. He was moving to a bunker in the basement while the others began scrambling to their stations. Mason stopped when he heard and felt the tremendous explosion. He could hear the screams of the dying and the continuing booms as the gas tanks on the Humvees exploded.

Mason was standing on the courthouse lawn when the first rocket came in and hit a parked Humvee on the street. That boom was a little close and he had moved back as other rockets began to fall in a spraying pattern. His soldiers were hunkered down waiting for the next blast instead of trying to stop it. Then another powerful blast tore open another barricade. Mason ran toward that barricade and ordered his soldiers to go out and find the guerrillas. It took longer than he would have liked to clear the area so that they could get out and in those lost minutes the guerrillas had disappeared.

It took over an hour to stabilize the town. The initial blasts had killed less than fifty soldiers even with the rockets, but those soldiers turned and had bitten others. Mason sent his patrols out to look for guerrillas and he ordered them to kill on sight all survivors. He wasn't bothering to bury any survivors. Let their bodies lie in the sun and be a warning for all those who would fight against the Army of the Carolinas. Half of his force went out to search and the other half guarded the town.

Mason waited in the courthouse for the patrol to come back and report in. They began straggling back in the early afternoon. They had not found any survivors and there was evidence of a hasty evacuation in some places. The good people of Allanvale County had left taking with them all that they could move. The more serious blow was that of the twelve patrols that he had sent out this morning only five came back. The others had just disappeared into the countryside. Mason knew what had happened. They had deserted. They had weapons and a vehicle and a sudden desire to put as much territory between them and Allanvale County as they could get. They had been farm boys before they were conscripted into the army and it was planting time now. The smell of freshly turned soil had woken them from this nightmare and they had decided that somewhere they could find a group that needed farmer-fighters.

Mason ordered the town burned and after it was set afire he and what was left of his army took the road back to Savannah. He was down but he wasn't out. He was washing his hands of Allanvale County but he was still taking his army to search for Melinda and Matthias. Melinda had grown up in Coulter Gap, North Carolina and he was going there first. He didn't care about Melinda but she had defied him by running off and she must be punished, but he did want his son. He would bring Matthias back to Savannah and he would mold him into being his successor. King of the Carolinas had a nice ring to it.

AN

North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia were all considered "Carolina" at one time in American history. So Mason aspires to control that whole area someday and it would be known as Carolinas.

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