Jerry Ahern - Survivalist 08 - The End is Coming

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THE SURVIVALIST #08.
THE END IS COMING.
by Jerry Ahern.
Chapter One..
Rourke eased the dead Mulliner boy's head to the rocks. Rourke stood up, tired suddenly, more
tired than he had been for so long he couldn't remember.
He walked the few paces to the stream at the base of the falls, the roar there loud, steady,
throbbing, pulsing in his ears. Spray pelted at his face as he dropped to his knees beside the
water, dipping his right hand down, moving his fingers slowly in the cold, roaring waters, the
blood drifting from them, Bill Mulliner's blood, forming clouds in the water, red.
He heard movement behind him. He knew the source. Rourke closed his eyes, felt the hands, soft,
cool, touch at his neck, move across his face.
"You have found them, John, "
"Probably," Rourke answered, his voice soft, a whisper.
"I'll take Paul to the Retreat, he can help me to unload the cargo from the aircraft and we can
get it to the Retreat, I'll stay with him until you come back."
Rourke opened his eyes, hearing the water rushing, watching it move, turning his head, still on
his knees, looking up at her. "And?"
"My uncle, I'll go back, to Chicago, to the KGB, to, "
Rourke stood up, the falls roaring now, as loudly as his blood in the veins at his temples
roared, his heart fast. "No," he rasped, drawing her into his arms.
Natalia's hands, he felt them move across his face, into his hair, his arms bound tightly
around her waist and shoulders. He looked at her, at her eyes, their blueness, the whiteness of
her skin, her mouth, the lips moist, slightly parting as she leaned her face toward his.
Rourke bent his face, his lips touching lightly at hers, then crushing down against her mouth,
her body pressed tight against him.
Her hands, he could feel them move, he could feel her breath on his skin, her body rising and
falling against his, the pressure of her breasts against his chest.
Then her face was beside his, half against his left shoulder.
He heard himself telling her, "I love you, you won't leave, you won't go back, "
"Sarah," she whispered.
"I, I, I can't, I love her, too, I, "
"I'll leave, "
Rourke took Natalia's arms roughly in bunched fists, holding her away from him at arms' length,
her face downturned, her hair falling forward, her body limp-seeming. "You won't leave me, I
won't, I won't let, "
She looked up at him, her eyes open, wet at the rims, making their blueness that much more
bright. Her left hand reached out to him, halting, awkward because of the way he held her upper
arms below the shoulders. The fingers of her hand, splayed, now closed, soft as they touched
against his lips. "I'll stay with you forever if you want me, "
Rourke drew her against him. "Yes," he whispered, not knowing what else to say. He laughed, and
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she looked up at his face.
"John?"
"I never planned for this," he said, holding her, hugging her against him, hearing the sound of
the water and the sound of her breathing....
Chapter Two.
"Do you think, Paul, well, what do you think?" She looked at Rubenstein as they rode along the
level grasslands to intersect the highway leading nearest to the Retreat. He didn't answer her,
and she started to raise her voice over the throb of the Harleys' engines, to repeat her question.
"Paul, I wanted to know, do you, "
She watched as he took his eyes from the path of the bikes, as his left hand moved slowly
upward, pushing the wire-rimmed glasses off the bridge of his nose. "I heard you, I just didn't
know what to answer you. I didn't know what to think, to say, I don't know"
"You think I'm crazy?" And she slowed the Harley under her, arcing it in a wide circle in the
grass of the gently rolling field, a house distantly visible, but no sign of human habitation
beyond that, and no sign of occupancy. Rubenstein's bike slowed ahead of her, turning in a lazy
circle back toward her, Natalia watching as the wind tossed his thinning hair, tossed the high,
uncut grass as well, hearing the evenness of the Harley's engine. Then the silence as the engine
cut out, like her own had.
"What do you want me to say? That I think John should have two wives? Remember, Jews aren't
polygamous. And neither are Russians, I hear, so I can't tell you anything more than you know
yourself, Natalia."
"But, " She looked down at the controls of her machine, they were unchanging. She rested her
hands on the flap coverings of her belt holsters, feeling the weight of the two L-Frame Smith &
Wessons in the gunbelt at her hips. "I just, ahh, I don't, "
"John wants you to stay, and you want to stay. And for what it matters," and she watched his
eyes behind his glasses. "For what it matters, well, I want you to stay, too, I do, " The
background silence broke, Paul Rubenstein's Harley gunning to life. He just looked at her, Natalia
hearing his voice above its throb. "Ready?"
She nodded to him, but it might have been a lie....
She had insisted on using the road, crossing the rougher country was difficult with Paul's
wound, difficult for him, pain etched more deeply across his face with each bump and twist. And
the highway was faster as well. And it was only a few miles to ride. She had given herself all of
these arguments and then given them to Paul, and Paul Rubenstein had relented.
A peacefulness had come about her now, the peacefulness that she had sometimes felt in her life
when destiny was beyond her control. John Rourke would find his Sarah, and Michael, and Annie.
What would happen after that would happen. Rourke had ordered her to stay, and she would. Two men
in her life she had felt merited her obedience, her uncle, General Ishmael Varakov, supreme
commander of Soviet Forces of the North American Army of Occupation, and Doctor John Thomas
Rourke, she rolled the name on her tongue.
When she had met and married Vladmir Karamatsov, she had thought she had fallen in love, but
she had realized soon that she had been taken in. She was the niece of one of the Soviet Union's
most highly placed military commanders, the Soviet Union's most respected soldier of World War II,
and he was the hero of World War III, she knew, but his praises would never be sung. Rather than a
bath of blood, he had sought to handle his task with as much equanimity as possible, to treat the
conquered American people, she smiled at that, for Americans truly seemed unconquerable on the
most fundamental of levels, to treat them like people, with dignity. To get his job done, the job
of supplying the Soviet war effort in Asia against the Chinese Communists, but to restrain the KGB
from its intended purge, had brought her uncle into conflict with her husband, and it was this
conflict that had led to her husband's abuse of her body, of her soul, had led to her uncle's
constructing events in such a way that John Rourke had no choice but to kill her husband.
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Her Uncle Ishmael, she smiled at the thought. A humanist, a good humanist, and perhaps because
of that, he was a better Communist than all of them.
And John Rourke, as dedicated an anti-Communist as she had ever known, as she had ever thought
could exist, but capable of great tenderness, of love, of understanding. And she loved both men,
the Communist general and the anti-Communist doctor and survivalist. And both men loved her. It
was a happiness that she felt, despite the aftermath of global thermonuclear war. And the idea of
happiness was itself ridiculous.
But Natalia Anastasia Tiemerovna, major, Committee for State Security of the Soviet, felt it,
happiness, anyway.
She wanted to say something to Paul, that she loved him deeply like she would love a brother,
or a close friend, she had had neither.
She turned her face, her hair caught in the slipstream of the air around her and the Harley
that throbbed between her legs. She looked at Rubenstein as she brushed hair back from her eyes.
She felt stupid, shouting it to him. "I'm happy, Paul!"
They were starting into a curve as they passed beneath an outstretching roadside oak to their
right, the angle of the road dropping steeply left, an abandoned roadside store on the left
perhaps forty yards ahead. In the gravel parking lot between the store and the road were more than
a dozen men on motorcycles or standing beside them. Heavily armed, the men were Brigands.
She swung her M-16 forward on its sling. She slowed her bike. She looked at Paul Rubenstein,
his German MP-40 submachine gun was in his right fist. She felt a tear at the inside corner of her
right eye. Natalia Anastasia Tiemerovna, major, Committee for State Security of the Soviet, told
herself the tear in her eye was only from the wind. It had been foolish, dangerous, to feel happy.
Chapter Three.
He laughed when he thought of it, "trigger control." It had been his slogan, his watchword, so
long, but so little time, ago. Paul Rubenstein pumped the Schmeisser's trigger, a neat three-round
burst across the forty yards or so separating him and Natalia from the dozen Brigands, pumped the
burst toward the nearest of the two Brigands raising assault rifles toward them. And the Brigand,
a tall, beefy man wearing a sleeveless blue denim jacket, doubled up jacknife fashion, falling
forward.
A sharper, louder crack, hot brass pelting at his left cheek, Natalia's M-16, a long burst, the
second rifleman going down, his legs cut from under him, gunfire raining toward them now as others
of the Brigand band opened fire, motorcycles starting out of the gravel parking lot, skidding into
the loop of highway that flanked the lot on two sides.
"Back the other way!" Natalia was screaming. Rubenstein fired another burst, then another and
another, the comparatively mild recoil shocking his body, bringing a wash of cold sweat to him,
his arms aching like a bad tooth. He started cutting the Harley into a steep arc, firing another
burst, downing still another of the Brigand bikers, the Brigand's machine, a Japanese bike
dripping chrome and gleaming like something just off a showroom floor, skidding across the
highway. The Brigand was screaming, dragged behind it, the bike's engine roaring, sparks showering
up from the road surface, then a scream more hideous than anything Paul Rubenstein had ever heard,
a shriek. The Brigand's left leg, as the machine whiplashed against a rock of massive proportions,
the rock a barrier between the corner of the gravel lot and the loop of highway, the left leg was
torn away, the bike exploding as it struck the boulder-sized rock, a spray of flaming gasoline
belching laterally across the loop of highway then rising, the amputated leg of the Brigand like a
flaming log, the Brigand himself screaming again as flames engulfed his thrashing body.
Rubenstein fired out the Schmeisser's magazine through the sheet of flame, a Brigand biker
crashing through it, bouncing to the highway, clothes and hair and face on fire.
Rubenstein let the Schmeisser drop to his side on its sling, snatching the battered Browning
High Power from the web tanker style shoulder rig under his field jacket, jacking back the hammer
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with his thumb. He fired once, the Brigand biker, a human torch, dropped, the burning arms and
hands slapping up toward the face, the face like the burning head of a match. What had been a man
fell.
Rubenstein gunned the Harley, Natalia twenty yards back along the road by now, her machine
stopped, the M-16 held in both her hands as she twisted in the bike seat, spraying death behind
them.
He shouted to her over the crackle of flames and gunfire, "Run for it!"
He shot his machine past her, hearing her machine rev on the whistle of the slipstream.
Paul Rubenstein looked behind him, Natalia was coming, riding low over her Harley, Brigand
bikers, at least six of them, starting out of the loop of highway and following.
Chapter Four.
The M-16's thirty-round magazine spent, she let the rifle fall on its sling, dismissing it as
she leaned her weight forward over the Harley, tucking her body down against the gunfire of the
pursuing Brigands.
Paul Rubenstein was ahead of her, his machine weaving, perhaps to avoid Brigand gunfire,
perhaps the pain in his arm making him weak. She didn't know.
Natalia kept riding.
There was a roar behind her and she looked back.
One of the Brigand bikers, he was breaking away from the rest, a three-wheeled trike, the roar
of its engine loud. She stared at the machine. From what she could tell it was no real bike at
all, something customized, hand built, chrome pipes gleaming everywhere, a chrome-plated
automobile-sized engine between the single front wheel and the rear wheels, just behind the
driver's seat. There was a rippling, exploding sound, the bike up on its rear wheels for an
instant, then rocketing toward her, a cloud of exhaust fumes rising in its wake.
The face of the man driving it, lips wide back from the bared teeth, snarling, one eye gone,
the right one. In the left hand she saw a shotgun, the barrels short, no buttstock at all, as far
as she could see.
The double side-by-side barrels were raising toward her as the three-wheeled machine gained on
her.
Natalia reached her right hand to the Safariland flap holster at her right hip, her fingers
curling around the smooth, memory-grooved Goncalo Alves stocks, the L-Frame Smith & Wesson in her
fist as she wrenched it from the leather.
She punched the Metalife Custom .357 Magnum out, toward the man with the shotgun coming at her
on the trike. If he fired first, she would be dead or worse, she knew. She double-actioned the
slab-side barreled revolver, the wheelgun bucking in her right hand, the face of the Brigand biker
seeming to erupt at the bridge of the nose and between the eyes. The shotgun discharged, both
barrels, Natalia turning her face away, hearing a roar then a roar louder than the shotgun blasts
had been, feeling heat sear at her right hand. She turned to fire again, but the trike, the biker,
a massive oak tree growing close out of the side of the road, the bizarre machine had climbed it,
hung from it now as flames rained down in chunks of burning flesh and debris and the trike and the
biker who had ridden it were gone.
She holstered the L-Frame, one of two given her by the de facto President of U.S. II, Samuel
Chambers, in her mind's eye she could see the American Eagles engraved on the right barrel flats,
remember the look in Rourke's eyes as Chambers had awarded her the guns, his token of thanks,
She was Russian, fighting Americans, fighting Russians, too, by hiding from them, at war with her
own KGB, at war with her own heart.
Natalia screamed into the wind, The Brigand bikers had given up their pursuit.
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Chapter Five.
Rourke slowed the jet-black Harley Low Rider. He eased the bike into a stop, letting down the
stand, dismounting, sliding the CAR-15 forward on its sling.
He stood beside the Harley, listening. He could hear faint clicking sounds as the Harley's
engine cooled, but, above these, he heard the sounds that had precipitated the Night of The War,
the sounds of advancing Soviet tanks.
The CAR-15's pistol grip clenched tight in his right fist, he walked ahead, leaving the Harley
by the side of the road, a dirt track leading from one main highway to another through farms and
woods.
He entered the woods now, moving slowly, pushing aside overhanging branches, not breaking them,
ducking the larger ones, squinting against the cool sunlight through his dark-lensed aviator-style
sunglasses. He moved the short, dark tobacco cigar with his tongue from the right side of his
mouth across his teeth to the left, clenching it there, still unlit.
The sound of the tanks was louder. He kept walking, the ground rising suddenly, dramatically
ahead of him.
He slipped the rifle slightly further forward, its muzzle plug already pocketed, the lens caps
for the Colt three-power scope already removed, pocketed in his brown leather bomber jacket like
the muzzle cap.
His right thumb played against the Colt rifle's safety lever, the ball of his thumb rubbing
against it, the safety off because there was no round in the CAR-15's chamber. Aboard a bike in
rough country, it was safer to travel that way.
The tree cover thinned as the ground rose, Rourke stopping near its edge, listening.
Tanks, many tanks.
"Tanks a lot," he almost whispered, smiling at his own joke. He eared back the CAR-15's bolt,
chambering the top round out of the thirty-round stick.
He chewed down harder on the cigar, flicking the safety to "on" and finding the Zippo in his
Levis pocket. He flicked back the cowling, rolling the striking wheel under his thumb, poking the
tip of the cigar into the blue-yellow flame. He eyed the initials on the old Zippo, J.T.R.
He pocketed the lighter.
Inhaling the smoke deep into his lungs, he walked from the tree line, glancing right and left
and ahead, searching for anything that didn't belong as his ears focused the bulk of his attention
on the sound of the tanks.
The ground was rising sharply now, and he judged that he'd be able to view the tanks from the
lip of the rise.
Rourke walked ahead, dropping into a crouch as he approached the height of the rise.
Chewing down on the cigar as he inhaled, he dropped onto his knees and elbows, raising his
rifle into his fists as he moved on, then stopped. There was no need for binoculars, or even the
scope on the CAR-15, at the distance of perhaps a quarter-mile, the ten tanks traveling in column
along what had once been an interstate highway were visible enough. The tanks were thirty-nine
plus ton T-72s, fitted with 125mm smooth-bore turret guns, more powerful than anything U.S. II
might possibly have to throw against them.
The confidence of the tankers upset him most of all, they traveled with hatches up and open,
heads and shoulders protruding above the hatches, men sitting on the tank bodies, hitching rides,
Soviet soldiers.
As he watched, the tank column slowed, then stopped.
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Rourke set down his rifle, snatching up his binoculars from the case at his side. He focused
the armored Bushnell 8x30s on the head of the column. He could see no reason for the tanks to have
stopped. He swept the binoculars forward, along the roadway.
An overpass bridge. In the shelter of the center pylons he saw something moving.
He focused the binoculars more sharply for the increased range.
A dog, a stray dog, like hundreds he had seen since the Night of The War. Homeless, dirty,
wild, ready to rip your throat to eat rather than starve. It looked part collie, perhaps part
golden retriever, it was the right color for that. She was, as the dog began to stand up, he could
make out beside it on the ground two puppies, barely visible. What the world desperately needed,
he thought, were more stray dogs.
He swept his binoculars back to the lead tank, nearer to him than the dogs themselves, the road
angling away from him in the direction in which the tanks moved.
The hatch open like the others, a man was clambering up and out of the hatch. There was an
argument going on, between the man from the tank and one of the outside riders. The focal point of
the argument seemed to be an AKM.
Rourke squinted, returned his gaze to the dogs. The female, the mother, was attempting to carry
one pup by the scruff of the neck in her mouth, nudging the other pup with her forelegs, with her
muzzle. She dropped the puppy from her mouth as she nudged at the other one. It rolled, unable to
fully stand. She picked it up again, nudging at the other puppy once more.
Rourke heard the sound, automatic weapons fire.
The mother dog fell, a broad splotch of red suddenly visible on her neck behind her right ear.
The puppy in her mouth was also shot, its body cut in half. Another burst of automatic weapons
fire, the little puppy on the ground. Its body seemed almost to disintegrate.
Rourke swept the binoculars back to the lead tank, the man from inside the tank held the Soviet
assault rifle to his shoulder, fired another burst, then handed the weapon back to the outside
rider.
The man from the tank was laughing. Rourke could see him, laughing.
Rourke chewed down harder on his cigar, feeling the smoke in his lungs. He replaced the
Bushnells in the pouch, zippered it shut.
He raised the CAR-15, extending the telescoped buttstock.
He judged the range at just under four hundred and fifty yards, stretching the CAR-15 beyond
common sense and reason.
If he'd had the Steyr-Mannlicher SSG, twice the range would have been possible and easily so.
He settled the three-power scope's reticle, between the shoulder blades of the man from the
lead tank, the man who had fired the AK.
Rourke closed his right eye a moment, he had killed wild dogs, many of them since the Night of
The War.
What the tanker, the commander likely, had done was something altogether different, he
realized.
And besides, Rourke thought, riding with the hatch open seemed to assume no American would
fight back against the tanks, would resist the Soviet invaders.
Rourke moved the safety. He started the trigger squeeze.
He felt the recoil, heard the crack, saw the scope shift slightly, blurred, then saw the man at
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the hatch of the lead tank, the man who had killed the dog and her two puppies, saw both hands
move suddenly to the small of the back just above the belt, dead center over the spine. The body
toppled forward, sliding across the front edge of the tank, slipping to the ground. The arms
flapped once, twice, then no movement. Rourke made a mental note to experiment with bullet drop
figures in excess of four hundred yards, he had aimed substantially higher.
As soon as he got the opportunity.
The Russians around the lead tank were moving, the second tank already starting laterally
across the road, some of the Russians who had ridden on the outside of the tanks, now hidden
beside the treads, returned fire. The rocks below Rourke and a hundred yards or so ahead of him
took the impact of the automatic weapons fire.
Rourke felt a smile cross his lips. "So long, asshole," and he was up, moving, the CAR-15's
safety coming on under his right thumb, raising his body up from its crouch, breaking into a long-
strided run toward the Harley. There was a roar, a high-pitched loud whistling sound, the 125mm
smooth-bore turret gun. He moved fast into a right angle, breaking through the tree line, running,
feeling the ground tremble as he was slapped forward by a rush of air, the HEAT round had impacted
to the left of his original line of movement. If he hadn't broken right, he realized, looking back
through the cloud of smoke and dirt and foliage raining down, he would have been dead. Rourke
pushed himself up, running again, if he could make the Harley, maximum speed on the T-72 series
was fifty miles per hour, the Harley could do better than that, and effortlessly.
He kept running, but at an oblique angle now, to his left, the tank gunner would try to
saturate the area. The gunner had fired left, now he would fire right, the whistling sound again,
the roar of a blast dying on the air.
Rourke threw himself into the run, the whistling louder, higher pitched.
He hurtled himself forward through an opening in the tree cover, shielding his head with his
hands. He felt the ground shake, but feeling at all meant he was still alive. Before the explosion
died, he was up, running, a cloudburst of dust and broken bits of foliage engulfing the woods
around him.
Fire, he looked behind him, the trees burning near the two impact sites.
He broke through the tree line, his bike, Soviet soldiers, six of them, they surrounded the
machine, their own motorcycles parked on the opposite side of the dirt track.
The nearest of the men was turning, toward him.
No time for the CAR-15, Rourke's right hand flashed under his brown leather bomber jacket,
snatching at the Pachmayr gripped butt of the stainless Detonics there. As the Soviet soldier
raised his AKM, Rourke fired, the pistol bucking in his hand.
The soldier's face took the 185-grain JHP, the center of the face collapsing in the redness of
blood as the man fell back.
A second soldier, Rourke shot him twice in the chest, Rourke's left arm going out, his left
fist straight-arming a third soldier in the chest, knocking the man back and down.
Rourke jumped, his left leg snaking over the seat of the Harley Low Rider. He got the stand up,
firing the Harley's engine, pumping the trigger of the Detonics into the chest and abdomen of a
fourth Soviet soldier. The little Detonics was empty, the slide locked back. He thumbed down the
stop, letting the slide run forward, ramming the pistol into his belt. A fifth Soviet soldier,
Rourke's left leg snapped up and out, the toe of his combat-booted foot catching the man in the
groin as the soldier tried to bring his rifle to bear. Rourke gunned the Harley, almost losing his
balance, dragging his feet, keeping upright and taking off along the dirt road.
The Low Rider was best suited to highway driving, and making high speed on the bumpy, rutted
dirt road was difficult, keeping it up harder, he let the machine out as much as he dared, keeping
low over the handlebars as he looked back, one of the Soviet bikers was already coming, two more
were mounting up.
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Rourke's right hand slipped down to the CAR-15, his thumb working the safety off, he twisted
the muzzle behind him, firing once, twice, a third time, the Soviet biker nearest him skidding off
into the trees to avoid Rourke's fire. Rourke worked the safety again, letting the CAR-15 drop on
its sling at his side, his attention wholly focused now on riding.
Behind him, he could hear the sounds of bikes, the remaining two Soviets. He bent lower over
the Harley, he made it there was at least another mile of the dirt track before he reached paved
highway.
A deep rut, Rourke skirted the machine around it, balancing out with his feet, then gunning the
engine, jumping a huge bump, wrenching the machine up with his arms, gunfire from behind him now.
He looked back again, two bikers close, a third fifty yards or so behind them.
He couldn't risk firing, the road too rutted for him to shift a hand from the handlebars. His
body low across the jet black Harley, he kept riding. There was a sharp bend right, Rourke's
machine skidding through the curve, his right leg out, balancing the Harley, his right foot
dragging through the mud as the road dipped, the Harley grinding, Rourke wrenching at the machine.
Moving again, he kept the machine moving, through the curve and up the grade, the mud hard and
rutted again, Rourke jumping the bike laterally over a deep rut, the machine skidding, Rourke
balancing it out. Still moving.
A shouted curse from behind him, Rourke looked back, seeing one of the Soviet bikers down.
He gunned the Harley, taking the grade, jumping a hummock of ground, the dirt road evening out,
Rourke letting out the machine, ahead he could see paved road.
A ridge of packed hard mud and gravel, he jumped the Harley over it, nearly losing it,
recovering, letting the bike skid almost out from under him as he angled the machine right, he was
on the road.
Balancing out, his feet up, he revved the Harley, the crackle of his exhaust loud, gunfire
behind him as the coolness of the day turned into a chill slipstream around him, Rourke molding
his body over the machine.
The road was a straight ribbon, black, recently paved, he guessed, before the Night of The War,
the yellow double lines bright, fresh-painted.
Gunfire, the road surface behind him sparked with it as he looked back. Two of the Soviet
bikers still pursued.
His exhaust rumbled, sputtered, made a sound that seemed to split the fabric of the air as he
let the machine full out, the front wheel rising slightly, Rourke balancing as he fought the fork,
and then the slipstream around him was harder, louder, colder, punching at his face, tearing at
his hair, the gunfire was suddenly more distant.
He risked a look back once, the military bikes of the Soviet soldiers were fading in the
distance.
He chewed down once, hard, on his cigar butt, then spit it into the slipstream.
Chapter Six.
There had been more Russians as Rourke had moved off the highway and kept to the side roads,
the dirt tracks, more and more Russians. Supply convoys, tanks riding shotgun for them, moved
along each major artery in the directions of cities large enough to have airports. He had spent
hours watching them, unable to move because of them, waiting.
A truck had broken down, an axle, Rourke had guessed, watching from the distance with his
Bushnell 8x30s. After some time of Russian officers wandering about the truck, apparently shouting
orders, cursing out the driver and the like, the truck had been unloaded.
Rourke had expected confiscated M-16s, or explosives, or foodstuffs, even medical supplies. But
when one of the crates had broken, more stomping around, more apparent name-calling and
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threatening, the contents had proven to be a microfilm projector. All of the cases inside the
truck, as they were emptied out with meticulous care, were apparently possessed of the same
contents.
Rourke sat back, not looking at the road, considering instead.
He studied the CAR-15 as he laid it across his lap, how many thousands of rounds had he fired
through it? The parkerized finish of the thirty-round magazine up the well was badly scratched,
but the magazine was wholly serviceable. Absent-mindedly, he wondered if his friend Ron Mahovsky,
who had customized his Python, had survived the Night of The War. Rourke, retrospectively, decided
he should have asked Mahovsky to Metalife the CAR-15's magazines for added durability.
It was too late now, but many things were too late.
The microfilm projectors, why so many?
And he thought of Sarah, and Michael, and Annie. The children would have changed, not the time,
but the experience. And Sarah, he closed his eyes.
Before the Night of The War, they had always argued over his "preoccupation," as she had called
it, "with gloom and doom, preparing for the unthinkable", his concerns with survival. She had seen
guns as nothing more than weapons of destruction.
Rourke studied the profiled CAR-15 across his thighs.
It was hard to consider a rifle a weapon of destruction, considering the weapons unleashed on
the Night of The War.
He closed his eyes, he remembered the flight across the United States that night, he could not
forget it.
The children dying of burns in Albuquerque.
The teens who had called themselves the Guardians, in Texas. Their faces and their bodies
scarred with radiation burns, their lives ending, their minds scarred and gone with the horror.
He opened his eyes, staring at the gun, he had saved lives with it, tried righting wrongs.
John Rourke closed his eyes again, he wondered if Sarah had changed, at all.
Chapter Seven.
She looked at Annie, it was like Annie was trying to be her little carbon copy. One of the men
in the Resistance, a black man, Tom, had given Annie a bandanna handkerchief, blue and white. And
Annie wore it tied over her hair now, like Sarah herself had habitually worn one since The Night
of The War. She thought about that, when she had cleaned house, or been baking bread she'd
always, but there was no house to clean, no house at all.
Sarah Rourke licked her lips, getting up from the fire-blackened ridge pole of the destroyed
barn, fallen now. She had found it a favorite place to sit when she'd been outside the underground
survival bunker beneath the burned-out Cunningham farmhouse.
She started walking toward Annie, Annie pretending to read a book to one of the less seriously
wounded Resistance men. Sarah had brought the man from the bunker for the fresh air. The generator
that powered the ventilation system in the below-ground-level shelter needed fuel or foot-pedal
power. Fuel was in short supply, and so were feet with nothing to do but ride a bicycle. The job
was frequently falling to Michael. He had been an intrepid bike rider before The Night of The War
and she thought that now Michael almost seemed to enjoy working the foot-powered generator. But
foot power was not enough to pump sufficient air that the air smelled anything but stale and
dirty. And so spent as much time outside as she could.
The wounded man's airing was just an excuse.
She wondered, suddenly, as she walked, what it would be like inside her husband's Retreat, if
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he found her. "When," she said under her breath, correcting herself.
She stopped walking, about midway between the burned shell of the barn and the gleaming
whiteness of the corral fence where the quarter horses old Mr. Cunningham had raised once roamed.
They were gone now, but so were Tildie and Sam, her horse and John's horse, the horses she had
used with the children, the horses that had moved them out of danger, been like part of her
family, She stood there, wiping her hands along her blue-jeaned thighs, then resting her hands
on her hips. Under her right hand she felt the butt of the Trapper .45 Bill Mulliner had given
her. He should have met his Resistance contact by now, perhaps already be on his way back to
report to Pete Critchfield.
Mary Mulliner, Bill's mother, it was written in the lines etched in her face, a fear for him,
that she'd lose red-haired, blue-eyed Bill just like she had lost her husband, fighting in the
Resistance against Russians and Brigands. The .45 had been Bill's father's gun, and now it was
Sarah's.
She had already used it to save her life.
She rarely thought of it, it was so much a part of her now, carrying a gun, like wearing the
blue and white bandanna with which she habitually covered her hair.
Little Annie was still pretending to read to the wounded Resistance fighter. Birds whistled in
the trees.
Sarah closed her eyes, very tired. Would there be time to teach Annie Rourke to read, ever, and
not just pretend?
Chapter Eight.
General Ishmael Varakov sat on a park bench, halfway across the spit of land extending out
into the lake toward the astronomy museum. The wind was stiff and cold off the lake there.
Beside him, Catherine sat. His secretary, the girl who wore her uniform skirts too long, a shy
girl. A shy girl who had told him that she loved him when he had attempted to send her back to
spend the last few days with her mother and her brother in the home he would never again visit
beside the Black Sea. She had refused to go, he had let her stay.
He looked down at his left hand now, for some reason he yet didn't understand, his left hand
clutched her right hand. She was young enough to be his daughter, or perhaps granddaughter.
She would not call him anything besides "comrade general", and she whispered those words now.
"Yes, child," he nodded.
"We will all die?"
"Yes, child, all of us. A week, perhaps, if that, " And thunder rumbled from the sky, a flash
of chain lightning snaking low through gray clouds over the white-capped waters of Lake Michigan.
But the lightning subsided, passed. "Very soon," he whispered to her, "very soon, Catherine, the
lightning will not go away."
"I will miss it, if you can miss it, comrade general, being alive, I think."
He looked at her face, the rims of her eyes were moist. "You cry, child?"
She nodded yes.
"That you die, child? We will all die."
She shook her head no.
"Then why is it that you cry, child?"
"That I had to be told I would die, comrade general, before, before I, " and she looked away
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