So, we pick up with…a continuation of the aforementioned Grocery List of WW3. Warsaw, Paris, Berlin, Brussels, London (another continuity error, they retake that city later in the series), China and Russia get half blown to hell. For some reason, the land armies get launched, but nobody explains where. Did the Russkies invade Europe or China? The reverse? Come on, book, tell me!
It’s about now that we can cement one of Johnstone’s biggest problems with this series. In my high school English class, I was always taught to show, not tell. I don’t want to hear a clinical-sounding list of cities destroyed; I want to see it happen! I don’t want vague information about land wars; I want a viewpoint character on the front lines! I don’t remember Johnstone having this problem in his Westerns; why’s it suddenly affecting him so strongly now? I say it’s just a side effect of him jumping genres. He’s just so out of his depth that he’s losing the skill that made me love him in the first place.
And still we continue the list. Now we’re up to South America…why? This makes even less sense to me than nuking Mexico City. Buenos Aires, Rio, Santiago, the Panama Canal Zone…wha?
As Johnstone explains it, the men with their fingers on the Buttons “have no place to return to”, and so they decide “why not destroy the world just because we don’t have a home anymore?” I’ve known military men. These are some of the most well-disciplined men I’ve ever met, for the most part, physically, philosophically, and mentally. While I don’t think that’s all necessarily a good thing (a little flexibility is a positive trait in my book), I doubt my mom’s boyfriend, who at one point did work on a sub, would up and decide “Those Russian bastards killed my wife and kids! Let’s nuke the Panama Canal!” No, if anything, he’d lob another missile at Russia then head back to the US to try and rebuild.
And how does Johnstone treat these sociopathic/incompetent seamen? Well, he kind of doesn’t; to my knowledge, we never meet a single person who served in this area. I don’t see why we don’t, but I’m also not a professional pulp author.
So here we learn that, despite all those major capitals and various large cities that were nuked, the world got off “largely unscathed” by the first wave of missiles, with only three quarters of a billion people killed. I’m not going to bother checking to see if that’s anywhere near correct, as I don’t want to listen to that freaking list again, but somehow I doubt it. Not only were they supposed to have nuked some of the most populous cities in the world (taking in discontinuity, New York City alone holds, what, six or seven million?), but we launched those germ warheads that kill everyone within a certain radius of the blast site. I find the number rather suspect, but let’s move on before I spend the whole day tallying up fictional deaths.
But, as Johnstone says, “all governments, no matter how noble they may be, are vindictive”. Here, I actually agree with the guy. After the first wave, there’s not much you can do. So, I’ll skip the second wave and just give you the results:
…
They don’t give us results yet. All they say is “and the doomsday tapes were silently rolling.” Which would indicate, to me, that the entire world was destroyed. Sadly, this is not the case.
And, instead of actually giving us something interesting and worthwhile, we switch back to Ben Raines, who as we might remember was injected with a probably deadly amount of venom from a swarm of yellow jackets. Somehow, he slept through the apocalypse. That’ll be something to tell your future grandkids, eh?
Grandkid #1: Grandpa, where were you when World War Three happened?
Raines: Well, nameless stereotype, I was passed out on the floor because I got stung by wasps.
Grandkid #2: …jeez, Grandpa, you kind of suck.
So, Raines sleeps through the apocalypse. The worst he’s got is a badly swollen hand and the temporary lose of sight in one eye. Whoopee; drama. So, he spends several days trying to get better, regularly passing out on his way to get Benadryl. I’m so interested.
Thankfully, we leave the sick man and get back to the shopping list…and how often has anyone ever said that? So, the Air Force lost 75% of it’s total strength (what’re the odds that such a nice, round number would really result? Once, just once, I want someone to report, “Sir, we’ve lost 46.3% of our total strength”. The Marine Corps is almost totally wiped out (how and why? You mean to tell me there were no Marines outside of publicly-known and a few less-than-publicly known bases?). The Army’s reduced by more than 60% (round numbers kill kittens). The Navy loses more than 50% (…). The government of the US is destroyed. Whether this last bit is a good or bad thing, I don’t know.
So, Johnstone finally tells us what the American people are doing in the aftermath of WW3. They are still largely confused, which I can completely understand. In 24 hours, their entire world was destroyed; I’d be confused as well. The problem is that, for this broad mass of humanity, this confusion becomes their defining feature. The only people we see actually get a hold of themselves, in this book at least, and do something are A) The Rebels (the good guys), B) The evl librul government and their henchmen (the bad guys), and C) Looters. Aside from that, the American people just kind of sit there and wait for the government to do their work for them.
The American people are not entirely such extreme examples of sheeple-hood. If you looked at any given community, you could probably find at least one or two people that could take the role of shepherds to this flock of humanity, and once people have a leader, they naturally tend to form a cohesive group. Said group might be torn apart after a while by dissent and dissatisfaction, but in the wake of a nuclear apocalypse, I’d imagine that such things would be left for later and, for a while at least, people would band together to survive. Johnstone, however, disagrees; like Rand, he insists that only people like him and/or power-grubbing lunatics are the only ones with the willpower to get their act together, while the rest of us wander around like zombies, waiting for government handouts, completely incapable of doing...well, anything. As this is already patently absurd, I’m not going to waste my time and brainpower on refuting it.
Here, we also see one of Johnstone’s great loves. Gorn. For those of you who do not know the term, it means, essentially, “to describe in near-pornographic detail gory happenings”. The man describes, in said graphic detail, the melting of the eyeballs of the people who looked at the nuclear blasts. He spends long sentences describing exactly how a woman is raped (and, in the Ashes universe, there’s not a woman who hasn’t, apparently). Yep; exactly what I want to spend my off-time reading about. I think he was trying for realism, but there’s one slight problem here; this is NOT REALISTIC! It’s sickening! And, to top it all off, he also includes the same bits…about children. In fact, one of the sections they thankfully cut from this audiobook (if I’m not mixing the first and second Ashes books up) follows the travels of one group of kids, including a 12-year-old girl who is ridiculously well-endowed, as they try to find a place to hide from all this. And one of the (pre-teen, if I recall right) boys ends up as the sex toy of a recurring villain. Yeah.
I’m only three minutes into this section, and already I’ve got an entry about as large as the others on this book, so let’s buckle down, skip the gorn, and get back to the plot, shall we?
We get back to Ben, who is somehow still alive and able to care for his own wounds. How has this man not starved or dehydrated? Anyway, he gets better, staying safely inside his home, slowly recovering. He’s finally all better, and, after some minutia, he realizes that it’s his birthday! Yay! This prompts his realization that none of his friends or family called, giving him something to be sad about. Aww. He then decides to go into town to get a paper, and so discovers, roughly, what happened.
This was one of my most favorite parts in the book, as well as one of the only good bits in the entire series. Why? Because, when Raines gets to town, he finds it almost completely wiped out by plague. In his urge to insert more gorn, the narrator actually manages to capture the horror of arriving to such a sight. It was so effective that, when I’ve attempted to write my own apocalypse tales, I always include a similar scene. It really affected me. And that may be the only praise of this book you ever read come out of my fingers.
Then he ruins it with a flashback explaining just why the military shall rule after the Bomb goes off; because civilians are morons. According to this flashback, we don’t know diddly about staying alive, and we don’t want to know. Oh, and also in this flashback, we get a description of these much-hated civilians. “They’re content. They’ve got their pretty little houses, two cars in the garage, membership in the country club, and they think ‘being tough’ means ‘playing football”. You know what’s interesting about that? It perfectly describes one of the longest-lasting villains in the series, a man called Ashley, a Southern gentleman type who not only manages to last from his first appearance to the end of the first North American arc of the story, but also manages to come closer than most anyone to defeating Raines, mainly due to his frequent uniting with various other powerful warlords and being a very good strategist. In the end, of course, he’s defeated, but by that point, he’s outnumbered, outgunned, and has been forced into a box by Raines and his men. And, as his fortress is being shelled, he calmly sits at a typewriter and types up his memoirs. Not only did he stick out in my mind as something of a badass when I read his bits, but he remains one of my favorite characters in this entire series.
Anyway, back to our protagonist. Ben checks his CB radio, looking for anyone who survived. Nobody answers. While in town, he also picks up a Thompson machine gun. This becomes something like his signature weapon. Here we also get more information of Hilton Logan, and what exactly Ben/Johnstone hates about him. Logan’s a dove, and a librul. The author evidently cannot think of greater crimes, so he leaves it at that.
He fills his car and collects all the gas he could. Very good move, Raines. It’s here that he learns some more about the problem, from a note written by a dead man. A dead man who, despite going fast, remembered how to correctly spell “atomic”. Were I dying, I doubt I’d write a freakin’ diary entry. It’d be more along the lines of a last message to my loved ones. It’s also here that we’re introduced to the cannon fodder of the Ashes universe, at least for the first three-fourths of the series or so; common criminals who, in the wake of the worst war ever fought, have decided to become warlords. Aside from a few notable exceptions (such as the above-mentioned Ashley), none of them last more than a single campaign, much less entire books. There’s just a lot of them.
This section ends with a remark from Ben that, in these kinds of situations, “human scum survived, while those more deserving did not”.
And so we end this less-than-marvelous section. This was so tedious for me that I actually screwed up the order of events, going off memory a couple of times when the narrator got into talking in detail about the really, really obvious. And there are still 15 more. This is Nitpicker’s Hell, friends; listening to Ashes for all eternity.
Sadly, Johnstone is now dead, so I don’t wish to speak too badly of him. But my God, man, you should have just stuck to Westerns!
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