“Gotcha,” Rubenstein said, swinging the submachine gun off his back and slinging it under his arm.
Rourke turned back to the girl. “That Python of mine is Mag-Na-Ported—gas-venting slots on each side of the barrel. So it won’t give you as much felt recoil as you might expect.”
“I don’t understand,” the girl said.
He turned his head and looked at her a moment, saying, “Just fake it,” a smile crossing his lips.
He started the Harley Davison Low Rider between his legs into first and back onto the highway and toward the bridge. The buildings coming up on his right were gray factory smokestacks from light industry. Rourke’s Harley was halfway across the bridge now, and from the elevation he could look beyond the largely flat rooflines and into the town and beyond that into the gray-seeming desert. There was no sign of life. The winds were coming strong and Rourke tacked the Harley into them to keep their buffeting effect from flipping the big bike down. Three-quarters of the way across the bridge he angled right, trying to keep quartering into the wind as he did, heading the bike down and onto the off ramp into the town. Rubenstein, behind him as he looked back, was evidently having greater problems handling the heavy winds.
As Rourke’s Harley dipped below the level of the bridge, the bridge itself seemed to block the winds and he swerved slightly left, then straightened out, coming to a slow halt at the base of the ramp, then cutting a lazy figure eight in the street fronting it as he scouted in both directions, then heading right from the direction he’d come and into the town itself. The main street seemed some two blocks ahead, Rourke gauged, and he waved Rubenstein down along a narrow side street, glancing over his shoulder, watching the younger man sharply turning the bike and disappearing behind an intact but deserted-appearing building.
Rourke reached the main street, slowed and cut a gentle arc in the large intersection there and came to a stop. “It looks like everyone just vanished,” Natalie commented.
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this place,” Rourke said, staring down the street, waiting to see Rubenstein reappear approximately a half-mile down.
“A Neutron bomb?” the girl asked, her voice hushed.
“Now what would a nice young lady like you know about Neutron bombs?” Rourke said, not looking at her. He settled his sunglasses and pulled back the bolt-charging handle on the CAR-15, setting the safety on and swinging the collapsible stock Colt’s muzzle away from the bike and into the empty street. “It’s not a Neutron bomb,” he said. “Look over there.”
He watched over his shoulder as the girl turned, looking in the general direction the CAR-15 was pointed. Scrawny but healthy trees were growing in a small square. “No,” he said. “Everybody just left—or mostly everybody.”
He glanced down to his watch, then back up the street.
“Where’s Paul?” Natalie asked. He could feel her breath against his right ear.
“That’s just what I was starting to ask myself,” Rourke muttered, his voice a whispered monotone. “It might not be a bad idea, you know, for you to reach around my waist, unbuckle my gunbelt and put that Python on yourself—you might need the spare ammo on the belt.”
Rourke felt the woman’s hands and arms encircling his waist.
He helped her undo the buckle, craned his neck and watched as she slung the cammie-patterned gunbelt from her right shoulder across to her left hip, the Python in its flap holster on her left side, butt forward.
“You ready?”
The girl took the massive revolver from the leather and nodded.
“Okay,” Rourke said softly, starting the bike down the center of the deserted street.
He stared ahead of them, whispering over the hum of the Harley’s engine, “Did you just see something moving in that space between buildings about twenty-five yards back?”
“On the right?”
“Yeah…”
“Man with a rifle, I thought, but wasn’t sure.”
“Yeah… okay… I’m going up to the end of the block here and turn down and back into that secondary street Paul was coming up. That’s when we should hit it.”
“Brigands?” the girl said softly, her voice even, calm.
“Maybe worse—people defending what’s left of their town,” Rourke answered, curving the bike wide to the right and then arcing left into the far lane of the intersecting street—also seemingly deserted. The secondary street was coming up on the left, and as Rourke’s eyes scanned back and forth there was still no sign of Paul Rubenstein.
He pulled the Harley into another wide arc, cutting left into the secondary street. As he started the big machine along the uneven pavement, he heard Natalie behind him, whispering, her voice hoarse, “John—on your right!”
Rourke perfunctorily glanced to his right, raised his right hand in a small wave and whispered back to the girl. “Yeah… I saw them.” As they cruised slowly down the street on each side of them now armed men and women were appearing, stepping out of doorways, from behind overturned cars and trucks, closing in like a wall behind them. “Relax,” he rasped. “If they wanted to shoot first they’d be doing it by now.”
“I don’t take much comfort from that,” the girl said, almost angrily.
Suddenly, the girl almost screamed, “Look—up ahead—they’ve got Paull”
“Yeah… I see it,” Rourke said softly. Rubenstein was on his knees at the end of the street, his hands tied out, arms stretched between the rear axle of an overturned truck and a support column for one of the smaller factory loading docks. There was a young man standing beside Rubenstein, an assault rifle with fixed bayonet in his hands, the point of the bayonet at the side of Rubenstein’s throat. “I don’t know who these people are—but they aren’t brigands either. At least not the type we’ve seen.”
“John—go back!” Rubenstein screamed, the man beside Rubenstein then pressing the bayonet harder against Rubenstein’s throat, silencing him.
Rourke stopped the Harley he rode about twenty feet in front of Rubenstein, slowly but deliberately swinging the CAR-15 in the direction of the man with the bayonet, his right fist clenched on the rifle’s pistol grip.
“Who are you people?” Rourke asked slowly, his eyes scanning the knot of young men and women, all of them armed. He had counted—including the ones walled behind him now and blocking his way out— perhaps twenty-five, more or less evenly divided male and female and all of them in their middle to late teens.
“We’ll ask the questions,” a dark-haired boy with what looked like acne on his left cheek shouted.
“Then ask away, boy,” Rourke said, glaring at the young man but keeping the muzzle of his CAR-15 trained where it had been—on the one holding the bayonet to Rubenstein’s throat.
“Who are you?” the acne-faced voice came back, unsteadily but loud.
Rourke exhaled hard, saying in a voice not much above a whisper, “John T. Rourke, the girl here says she’s Natalie Timmons and the man your pal has on the ground there is Paul Rubenstein. Just wayfarin’ strangers, kid.”
“Who are you with?” the leader shouted.
“You don’t listen too good, do you boy?” Rourke said, shooting an angry glance at the perhaps eighteen-year-old belonging to the voice.
“I mean what group are you with?”
“Well,” Rourke began. “I belonged to a motor club before the war. That do you any good?”
“Cut out the smart-ass routine, mister!”
“Boy,” Rourke said slowly, menacingly, “you talk that way to me once more and you’ve got an extra navel—just a shade over five and a half millimeters wide,” and Rourke gestured with the CAR-15, then settled it back covering the man guarding Paul Rubenstein. “Now—what are you doing with my friend here?”
“You came to steal from us, didn’t you?” the acne-faced leader shouted.
“What—you deaf kid,” Rourke said. “Learn to control your voice. If you’ve got something I want, I’ll deal with you for it. If there’s something I want that nobody’s got but it’s there anyway, yeah, I’ll take it. Promissory notes and money and checks and credit cards aren’t much good these days, I understand.”
“We call ourselves the Guardians.”
“Well—how nice for you. What are you the “Guardians” of?”
As Rourke asked the question, he could hear Natalie trying to whisper to him. He leaned back away from his handlebars and caught her voice, “Rourke—behind us—six of them coming.”
“We are the Guardians—”
“You ask me,” Rourke said, “I think you’re the crazies, myself.” Suddenly Rourke’s body tensed as he leaned forward. His tone softening, he addressed all the young men and women there, shouting, “How many of you have marks on your faces like he has—or elsewhere on your bodies?”
A girl stepped forward out of the knot around the leader. Rourke saw the acnelike marks on both her cheeks and neck. “Who are you?” she demanded.
The six advancing from behind Rourke were getting closer. He could see them now out of the corner of his left eye.