after all of this—“ and he laughed, holding her body tight against him. He felt
Michael’s hand on his shoulder. “I really—“
“Dad, what—“
Rourke licked his lips. He looked up, at his son, and at the woman he had not been supposed to love but did. “Inside that room—it’s a very basic surgery. I found tools—the kind you’d only use for one thing. And then evidence they were making pills—and two empty shelves. We’re going to open that vault—and every single person from here—“ “I found the combination. All I have to do is—“ “I’ll do it. Don’t come in unless I tell you to.”
“I can—“
“Please,” Rourke whispered, and he stepped away from Natalia a single step. He leaned his lips to her forehead, touching her there. Then he turned to the vaul’t door. He placed his left hand on the handle. “You want your rifle, Dad?” Michael asked.
Rourke only shook his head. He worked the handle downward hard, then pulled on the vault door, swinging it open. “Don’t go inside,” he Ol whispered, going inside.
The overhead light bulbs—he imagined they had found a way of making their own filaments and reusing the bulbs—were bright. He could see clearly. Nearly one hundred people—seven men in three-piece business suits and red bedroom slippers; seven women in elaborate re-creations of high fashion dresses from five centuries ago (but they too, incongruously, wore the red slippers); a half dozen children, two boys and four girls, in fashionably expensive looking clothing from five centuries ago, wearing diminutive versions of the red slippers; roughly seventy-five men and women and children in gray slippers, the men wearing the off-white jackets of busboys, the women in severe gray maids’ uniforms, the children dressed identically to the older members of their caste. Infants as well. A few of the business-suited men were missing—the ones from the fight in the cave and the attack of the cannibals, Rourke surmised. Those men were dead. And so was everyone in the room.
Rourke dropped to his knees beside the body of a dead little boy—one of the servant class, a descendant of one of the former masters who had begun it all five centuries earlier. Rourke’s right hand reached out to the boy, the boy sitting against the back of a man, a woman’s head resting in the boy’s lap. Rourke closed the boy’s eyes, and then he closed his own… “Dad!”
Rourke didn’t open his eyes. “Stay outside with Natalia, son,” and then he opened his eyes and he stood, staring down at the dead clustered around him. He began to walk the length of the vault, stepping over the dead, stopping to examine a dead child or a dead woman or a dead man to be certain—but they were all dead.
He found the old one, knowing it was the man Michael had spoken of. The watch chain—Rourke held up the key, letting it sway a moment pendulum fashion. Rourke shook his head, then bent to the man-he replaced the key and closed the man’s eyes.
The far end of the room—he started toward it now. Cloth bags were there—the shapes were enough to show him, stacked one atop the other. Generations of the Families.
He looked at the old one. “For what?” John Rourke whispered.
He would not have expected an answer even if any of them had remained alive. There was a dead woman near his feet as he stopped near the vault door, her eyes dull but once pretty he knew. He looked at her right hand as he closed her eyes—the skin was rough textured from toil. If it were a symbol of poetic justice for the sins of her ancestors—if all of it were that, John Rourke thought. He shook his head, “Aww, shit,” and he stood up and walked back to the living.
Chapter Fifty-Six
“They’re all dead—mass murder or mass suicide, I don’t know which,” Rourke told them as he walked, again Natalia and Michael flanking him. “The surgery was used for castrations—the Counsel of Ministers realized what they had done sending people out into the outside world. Some of them survived by eating the others and there was no other way for the Ministers to reduce their population without sending out surplus people. So, they castrated the men. The reason we only saw men outside was because of the few who were strong enough to stay alive and be accepted into the cannibals—the ones Madison calls Them— none were women.” And he looked at Natalia. “Even if you were out there, with no weapons, no martial arts training—you wouldn’t have had a prayer.”
“I disagree,” Natalia said flatly.
Rourke put his right arm around her shoulders for an instant, then found her left hand and held it as they continued walking. “Likely the cannibals had enough sense left that when their numbers began dwindling, they’d let new members in—and the food was less needed. Population control for the outside world as well. Involuntary—just like it was inside. You said,” and he looked at Michael, “that one or two of them shouted ‘meat’ as they attacked. They were probably some of the more recent acquisitions to the tribe—they still retained some language that was recognizable. There isn’t any village—they wander, eating what they can off the land and waiting for their ration of meat. And they were never disappointed. Never at all. But they can’t reproduce sexually at all. And with their meat supply gone, some of them will starve to death and the rest of them will just die off naturally. Ten years from now, maybe twenty— none of them will be left. It’ll be as if none of them ever existed. A five-centuries-old tribe, which split in two, completely extinct—except for Madison. Some of them—some of them out there now. Some of them still probably have language abilities, but using language like we know it would have been so rare that it just ceased being necessary. Some of them—we could probably talk with them, bring the language back to them.”
“Isn’t there anything we can do?” Michael asked. “For Them—nothing. Their religion, their lifestyle, their ritual—all of it tied to receiving the human sacrifices. And they won’t have that anymore. We could try to teach them other ways— but they wouldn’t let us.” He had locked the vault door and taken Michael’s revolver and from a safe distance shot off the combination dial. It could never be opened without torches or explosives. “We have to get all the useful stuff from here that we can carry, then make it away from here.”
“Madison told me there were rumored to be other exits from here.” “I could look for them—if we could find another way out, we could avoid another battle with the people outside. I don’t—“ Rourke looked at Natalia. “Agreed—there’s been enough death. Meet us back at the arsenal room—and be careful.”
Natalia started to turn off and Rourke reached out to her. She looked back at him. “One hour or less,” and she glanced to the gold ladies’ Rolex on her left wrist, her left hand held in his right.
“Agreed—one hour.” ^
Rourke watched after her a moment and then tapped his son on the shoulder.
“You’re a strong young man—that means you can carry a lot of stuff to the bikes.
Come on.”
Rourke started toward the arsenal room, his son beside him.
Chapter Fifty-Seven
She felt bone weary—the travel and the exertion through the thinner air had sapped her strength, she knew. But she forced herself into the gentle run as she moved along the corridor toward the conference room, one of the M-16s held at high port in her balled fists.
She stopped, before the conference room doors.
She started through, inside, past the conference table and the still-open safe, slowing now, stop-ping before the rear wail of the conference room. She had seen executive quarters in all parts of the world—the Kremlin, Washington, the corpora-don boardrooms of New York, Zurich. There was always a secret way in and out.
“Always,” she whispered.
As she began examining the wall surfaces, she thought of John Rourke—of his sadness. He had wanted for the world to be changed, for the evil to be gone from it. He had always, she knew, considered her naive. She smiled at the thought— for once she was the realist.
Evil was as intrinsic to life as good.
Her left hand stopped—she found a seam. Her right hand had the Bali-Song, the knife flicking open in her hand, the tip of the Wee-Hawk blade following the seam now, scratching the paint ever so slightly, but giving the seam in the wall greater definition.
She dropped to a crouch, wiping the blade clean on the carpet, flicking the handle half to close the knife, thumbing closed the lock as she squeezed the handles tight together. She pocketed the Bali-Song, feeling down the length of the wall to the floor, a smile something she could feel on her lips as she found the floor seam, following this as well—she had found the door. She followed the seam out to where it stopped.