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 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 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 from him, Varakov feeling her hand in his, her nails digging into his flesh. It was life—sensation was life now, and he did not tell her to stop.
Chapter Nine
Rourke stopped the Harley-Davidson Low Rider, dismounting as he let down the stand.
Below him, in a shallow depression too small to be actually called a valley, was a burned farmhouse—or so it appeared to be. A barn too, also burned. There was a white fence, a corral fence, freshly painted it seemed, gleaming white against the blackness of the burned timbers of the two buildings. There was movement near the shell of the house.