Chapter Seven
The scoped Stalker slung diagonally across his back, Michael Rourke started down from the rocks, into the valley, the Retreat—his father had told him once that^Jatalia Tiemerovna referred to it as “Rourke’sMountain”—in the distance. He had begun ranging the mountains surrounding the Retreat when he was twenty and in nearly ten years, he had seen no sign of animal life, but the vegetation—where it grew at all—was thicker and lusher with each spring. He quickened his pace— Annie, who had turned into a superb cook, was fixing meat. It was a special-occasion delicacy usually—for his birthday or her own, but this was not January, the month of both their birthdays. Annie, that morning, had simply said, “I’m tired of being a vegetarian—I’m taking some meat out of one of the freezers. Make sure you’re not late for dinner.” Michael Rourke hadn’t argued.
A rabbit or a squirrel—had he seen one, he would not have shot it, but attempted to follow it.
^ He would have brought such an animal food from their gardens. But no such animal existed.
No birds flew in the sky. No insect buzzed.
Some type of beetle to attack the vegetables in the gardens would have been welcome, but there were none.
Perhaps in other parts of the world, or at lower a 1 ti tudes—perhaps. He had taken one of the three Harley Davidson Low Riders once, taken it far from the Retreat. That had been five years ago. He had ranged for more than a hundred miles in the four cardinal directions. He had found the rusted, gutted remains of an automobile. He had found the ruins of what had once been a city—skeletons of buildings now. Not even a human bone survived. But the strategic fuel supplies were intact—it had been the announced reason for the trip. He had checked two of the reserves and they still held their precious gasoline.
Annie would range from the Retreat as well at times. He didn’t worry that terribly much for his sister. She had begun mastery of the Detonics Scoremaster .45 she had liked so much, begun its mastery when she was fifteen. At twenty-eight— almost—she was a superlative shot. At one hundred yards, without a scope, using just the Bo-Mar iron sight, she could consistently hit objects Michael could barely see with the naked eye.
They had begun reading through the Bntannica when in their late teens. He had reached the end of volume seventeen of the Macropaedia and found it amusing to read the information concerning tax laws. Taxes were no more. Michael remembered an expression his father had used once—something regarding the inevitability of death and taxes. Taxes were no longer inevitable. He wondered if death were.
The thought was vaguely disquieting to him that he had known more people who were now dead than still alive. As best he had been able to ascertain in nearly sixteen years of monitoring the airwaves on the Retreat radio, Qf studying the stars and the daytime sky as well, of searching the ground for the slightest sign, no one else lived on the earth.
He had been tempted once to take one of the Harleys and drive/toward Colorado where the Soviet Womb had Keen. But if anyone had survived there, they would likely be his enemies now as they had been his father’s enemies almost five centuries earlier.
At night, when he monitored the radio or studied the stars through the telescope, he would sometimes sit with a glass of the corn-based whiskey—it was quite good now and, at least to him, the taste was as pleasing as the occasional glass of Seagram’s Seven; other times he would stare at the cryogenic chambers. Annie would always fall asleep earlier than he, perhaps while they watched a film together on the video recorder. But there were the alone times—and as he watched the cryogenic chambers, he would consider what it would be like when there were no longer just two people walking the earth, but six instead. As he walked along the mountain road leading to the Retreat now, he wondered again. What was the woman Natalia like?
He remembered from his early childhood seeing his mother and father kiss. From films, he had seen others. One film in particular—the man and the woman lay in bed beside one another. He was not sexually ignorant of the technical aspect of it—he had read, his father in his wisdom having provided things for them both. And before his father had slept, his father had told them both things, answered questions.
But he watched the woman Natalia sometimes, wondering. And he wondered at his father’s remarks about the imperative of all six of them surviving.
Michael Rourke sometimes thought that he thought like his father—and if he did, he realized, then he knew what his father planned and it alternately warmed and frightened him… “I got the recipe from that cookbook Mom wrote once. What do you think?” Michael Rourke put down the glass of Seagram’s—it was, after all, a special occasion. “I liked it, Annie. What did you call it again?” “Beef Stroganov. But I didn’t have any wine, so I used some of your homemade beer.”
“Terrific. The man who marries you—“ and Michael Rourke shut up. He watched his sister’s brown eyes, brown like his. She moved her hair—she kept it at waist length—back from her face. “What do you think Dad has planned?” she asked, her voice soft—like Michael remembered his mother’s voice being soft. “You want my honest opinion?”
“Yeah, I want your honest opinion. I’m gonna get dessert. Strawberry shortcake—come on and refill your glass.” She stood up, walking back toward the stove and the counter beside it. Michael climbed down from the stool, taking her empty glass as well as his. He passed her, standing at the nearer counter, untwisting the cap on the bottle. “What do you think? You want some more 500-year-old whiskey?”
“Talk about aging! Am I gonna need some more whiskey?” / “Might not be a bad idea.”
“All right.” She paused. “I’ll have some more whiskey. You want a lot of strawberries?”
“Yeah.”
He poured the second glass, closed the bottle and turned to watch her as she fixed the strawberry shortcake, ladling freshly cut strawberries which they had grown themselves onto the chunks of cornbread. She was dressed as she usually dressed. Rarely did she wear pants, although she was so talented that she could easily have made more than the few pairs she had fabricated. His father—their father—had provided before the Night of The War bolts of material and thread and a sewing machine and all the necessary accessories. Annie had taken Aft to using the machine like a pianist would take to a concert-tuned piano. He had read about concerts, pianists and the like, watched the videotape of a concert several times. And he listened to music incessantly, as did Annie. But she wore one of her typical in idea If- length full skirts, navy blue in color. And a blouse which seemed to hold up on her shoulders by friction—he had read a novel where such a garment had been described as a “peasant blouse.” This was her usual attire. He watched her as she carried the dessert back to the main counter.
He followed her, crossing to the far side of the counter and straddling the stool. He scratched his bare left thigh where it itched beneath the ragged edge of the cut-off Levi’s. There were still more pairs of these in the storeroom than he could wear through in a lifetime, but these old ones were comfortable for sitting around the Retreat at night.
“So—what do you think he has planned for us?”
“Salud,” he murmured, raising his glass. He had studied Spanish from books and audio tapes and—again his father had provided—watched the one Spanish language movie in the tape library innumerable times.
“Salud, already.” And Annie clinked glasses with him. “So, what do you think?” He wished that he smoked, so he could have lit a cigar or cigarette and delayed saying what he felt. “All right.” But he didn’t smoke. “He always talked about the six of us being vital for survival.”
“AH right—so?”
“So—you’ve probably seen me—I’ve seen you do it—“ “What do you mean? What are you talking about?” “I’m talking about being human.”
“Michael!”
“I think he planned this all along, from the first time that he learned what was going to happen to end the world. That’s why he awakened us, spent only five years with us and then slept1. He planned it.”
“What do you—“
“When you look at Paul Rubenstein, in his chamber—what do you tjhink of?”
“That he’s—“ I
“That’s he’s a man? The only man who isn’t your blood relative?” Michael Rourke watched his sister. She looked down at her dessert, playing with it with her spoon, not eating it. “I think about that,” she whispered. And she looked up then. “And what about Natalia?”