Rourke smiled.
As he zeroed toward the ever-growing dark spot ahead of them on the highway, his mind flashed back to the beginning of the curious partnership between himself and the younger man. Though trained as a physician, Rourke had never practiced. After several years with the CIA in Latin American Covert Operations, his interests in weapons and survival skills had qualified him as an “expert”—he wrote and taught on the subject around the world. Rubenstein had been a junior editor with a trade magazine publisher in New York City—he was an “expert” on pipe fittings and punctuation marks. But they had two important things in common. They had both survived the crash of the rerouted 747 which Rourke had been taking to Atlanta in order to rejoin his wife and children in northeastern Georgia. That night of the thermonuclear war with Russia had seemingly gone on forever. And now Rourke and Rubenstein shared another bond here in the west Texas desert. Both men had to reach the Atlantic southeast. For Paul Rubenstein, there was the chance that his aged parents might still be alive, that St. Petersburg, Florida, had not been a Soviet target and that the violence after the war had not claimed them. For Rourke—in his mind he could see the three faces before him—there was the hope that his wife and two children were alive. The farm where they had lived in northeast Georgia would have survived the bombs that had fallen on Atlanta. But there were the chances of radiation, food shortages, murderous brigands— all of these to contend with. Rourke swallowed hard as he wished again that his wife, Sarah, would have allowed him to teach her some of the skills that now might enable her to stay alive.
Rourke skidded the Harley into a tight left, realizing he was almost past the abandoned truck trailer. He took the bike in a tight circle around it as Rubenstein approached. As he completed the 360 degrees he stopped alongside the younger man’s machine. “Common carrier,” Rourke said softly. “Abandoned. After we run the Geiger counter over it we can check what’s inside—might be something useful. Shut off your bike. I don’t think we’re gonna find any gas here.”
Rourke gave the Geiger counter strapped to the back of his Harley to Rubenstein and watched as the smaller man carefully checked the truck trailer. The radiation level proved normal. Rourke walked up to the double doors at the rear of the trailer and visually inspected the lock.
“You gonna shoot it off?” Rubenstein was asking, suddenly beside him.
Rourke turned and looked at him. “You’ve gotten awful violent lately, haven’t you? We got a prybar?”
“Nothin’ big,” the other man said.
“Well,” Rourke said, drawing the Metalifed Colt Python from the holster on his right hip, “then I guess I’m going to shoot it off. Stand over there,” and Rourke gestured back toward the motorcycles. Once Rubenstein was clear, Rourke took a few steps back, and on angle to the lock, raised the Magn-Na-Ported six-inch barrel on line with the lock and thumbed back the hammer. He touched the first finger of his right hand to the trigger, his fist locked on the Colt Medallion Pachmayr grips, and the .357 Magnum 158-grain semijacketed soft point round slammed into the lock, visibly shattering the mechanism. Rourke holstered the revolver. As Rubenstein started for the lock, Rourke cautioned, “It might be hot,” but Rubenstein was already reaching for it, pulling his hand away as his fingers contacted the metal.
“I said it might be hot,” Rourke whispered. “Friction.” Rourke walked to the edge of the shoulder, bent down and picked up a medium-sized rock, then walked back to the trailer door and knocked the shattered lock off the hasp with the rock. “Now open it,” Rourke said slowly.
Rubenstein fumbled the hasp for a moment, then cleared it and tugged on the doors. “You’ve got to work that bar lock,” Rourke advised.
Rubenstein started trying to pivot the bar and Rourke stepped beside him. “Here—watch,” and Rourke swung the bar clear, then opened the right-hand door, reached inside and worked the closure on the left-hand door, then opened it as well.
“Just boxes,” Rubenstein said, staring inside the truck.
“It’s what’s in them that counts. We could stand to resupply.”
“But isn’t that stealing, John?”
“A few days ago, before the war, it was stealing. Now it’s foraging. There’s a difference,” Rourke said quietly, boosting himself onto the rear of the truck trailer.
“What do you want to forage?” Rubenstein said, throwing himself onto the truck then dragging his legs after him.
Rourke, using the Sting IA from its inside-the-pants sheath, cut open the tape on a small box and said, “Well—what do I want to forage? This might be nice.” Reaching into the box, he extracted a long rectangular box about as thick as a pack of cigarettes. “Forty-five ACP ammo—it’s even my brand and bullet weight—185-grain JHPs.”
“Ammunition?”
“Yeah—jobbers or wholesalers use certain common carriers to ship firearms and ammunition to dealers. I’d hoped we’d find some of this. Find yourself some 9 mm Parabellum—may as well stick to solids so you can use it in that MP-40 as well as the Browning High Power you’re carrying. If you come across any guns, let me know.”
Rourke started working his way through the truck, opening each box in turn unless the label clearly indicated something useless to him. There were no guns, but he found another consignment of ammunition—.357 Magnum, 125-grain semijacketed hollow points. He put several boxes aside in case he didn’t find the bullet weight he wanted.
“Hey, John? Why don’t we take all of this stuff—all the ammo, I mean?”
Rourke glanced back to Rubenstein. “How are we going to carry it? I can use .308, .223, .45 ACP and .357—and that’s too much. I’ve got ample supplies of ammunition back at the retreat once we get there.”
“That’s still close to fifteen hundred miles, isn’t it?” Rubenstein’s voice had suddenly lost all its enthusiasm. Rourke looked at him, saying nothing.
“Hey, John—you want some spare clips—I mean mgazines—for your rifle?”
Rourke looked up. Rubenstein held thirty-round AR-15 magazines in his hands—a half-dozen. “Are they actual Colt?”
Rubenstein stared at the magazines a moment, Rourke saying, “Look on the bottom—on the floor-plate.”
“Yeah—they are.”
“Take ’em along then,” Rourke said.
“You sure this isn’t dishonest—I mean that we’re not stealing?”
Rourke, opening a box of baby food in small glass jars, said, “This is a war, Paul. A few nights ago, the United States and the Soviet Union had a major nuclear exchange. The United States apparently didn’t fare so well. Every place we flew over before the 747 crashed looked hit—the whole Mississippi River area seems to have been saturated. According to that Arizona kid I got on the radio before we crashed, the San Andreas fault line slipped and everything north of San Diego washed into the sea and the tidal waves flooded as far in as Arizona, and there were quakes there. Albuquerque was abandoned after the firestorm—except for the injured and dying and the wild dogs—you remember them. We shot it out with that gang of renegade bikers who butchered the people we’d left back at the plane while we went to try and get help. Now how would you evaluate all that?”
“No civil authority, no government—every man himself. No law at all.”
“You’re wrong there,” Rourke said quietly. “There is law. There’s always moral law—but we’re not violating that by taking things here that we need in order to survive out there. And the obligation we have is to stay alive—you want to see if your parents made it, I want to find Sarah and the children. So we owe it to ourselves and to them to stay alive. Now go and see if you can find something to use as a sack to carry all this stuff. I’m going to take some of this baby food—it’s full of protein and sugar and vitamins.”
“I have a little—I mean had—a little nephew back in New York—that,” and Rubenstein’s voice began noticeably tightening, “that stuff tastes terrible.”
“But it can keep us alive,” Rourke said, with a note of finality.
Rubenstein started to turn and go out of the trailer, then looked back to Rourke, saying, “John—New York is gone, isn’t it? My nephew—his parents. I had a girl. We weren’t serious but we might have gotten serious. But it’s gone, isn’t it?”
Rourke leaned against the wall of the trailer, his hands flat against the wood there, closing his eyes a moment. “I don’t know. You want an educated guess, I’d say, yeah, New York is gone. I’m sorry, Paul. But it was probably quick—they couldn’t have even tried to evacuate.”
“I know—I’ve been thinking about that. I used to buy a paper from a little guy down on the corner—he was a Russian immigrant. Came here to escape the mess after the Russian revolution—he was just a little boy then. He was always so concerned with his manliness. I remember in the wintertime he never pulled his hat down over his ears and they were red and peeling. His cheeks were that way. I used to say to him, ‘Max—why don’t you protect your face and ears—you’re gonna get frostbite.’ But he’d just smile and not say anything. But he spoke English. I guess he’s dead too, huh?”