“How about never?” Rubenstein said through the open passenger side window, forcing a smile.
“He’s right—Rourke is,” Natalie volunteered. “We’re better off with the brigands than caught between them and the paramils.”
“Let’s go down then and introduce ourselves,” Rourke said softly, starting back around the front of the pickup and climbing into the driver’s seat. He gunned the engine to life, out of years of habit looked over his left shoulder to see if there was traffic—there wouldn’t be, he realized rationally—and edged out onto the highway.
Rourke reached down to his waist and tried unbuckling the gunbelt, then turned and looked at the girl, feeling her right hand crossing his abdomen and seeing her turn awkwardly in the seat between himself and Rubenstein. She undid the buckle and he leaned forward in the seat and she slipped the belt from around his waist. “You want me armed again?” she asked.
“Yeah—might be advisable,” Rourke answered. “You seemed to do pretty well with that Python the last time—no sense messing with success.”
The girl rebuckled the Ranger Leather Belt and slung it diagonally across her body, the holster with the six-inch Metalifed .357 Magnum revolver hanging on her left side by her hip bone, the dump pouches with the spare ammo crossing her chest between her breasts. Rourke looked back to the road, hearing the sounds of Rubenstein checking the German MP-40, the gun the younger man still called a “Schmeisser.”
Rourke shifted his shoulders under the weight of the twin Detonics stainless .45s in the double Alessi shoulder rig, then reached into his breast pocket and snatched a cigar. He fished the lighter from his Levis and as he did, the girl took it from his hand and worked it for him, holding the blue yellow-flamed Zippo just right, below the tip of the cigar so the flame could be drawn up into it. “Where’d you learn to light a cigar?” he asked, nodding his thanks.
“My father smoked them,” the girl said, then closed the lighter and handed it back to him.
“What else did your father do?” Rourke asked, clamping the cigar in the left side of his mouth between his teeth and turning the steering wheel into an easy right onto an oif Tamp from the highway.
“He was a doctor—a medical doctor,” the girl answered, “like you are. When I was a little girl,” she said, “I was always going to grow up and be his nurse. But he died when I was eighteen,” she added, her voice sounding strange and without the easy confidence he had become accustomed to hearing in it.
“I’m sorry,” Rourke said quietly.
“I guess time makes everyone an orphan, doesn’t it,” Rubenstein said, sounding as though he were speaking more to himself than to Rourke or the girl. Rourke turned and looked at Rubenstein, saying nothing.
“Over there!” the girl said suddenly.
Rourke glanced back down the road and to his left. In the distance—in what must have been an athletic field—he could see a crude circle of semitrailer trucks and several dozen motorcycles, all moving slowly, dust filling the air around them. There were gunshots now, over the noise of the truck and bike engines, and again Rourke thought he heard what could have been screams, coming from inside the circle of trucks.
“What the hell are they doing?” Rubenstein asked.
“I think I know,” the girl answered.
“They’ve apparently gotten their mass executions into some kind of ritual, working themselves up into a frenzy before they do them, terrifying the victims too.” As Rourke spoke, the trucks began slowing down, the dust thinning. “And it looks like they’re ready for their number,” he added.
“I didn’t think there were so many crazy people in the world,” Rubenstein remarked, his eyes wide and staring at the trucks and the gradually diminishing dust cloud.
“Some people, maybe most people,” Natalie began, “can’t handle violence emotionally—they sort of revert to savages and along with that goes all the rest of it—”
Rourke finished for her, turning their truck off the road and crossing onto the far edge of the football field. “It’s the reptilian portion of the brain coming to the fore. A lot of work was done on it just before the war. The reptile portion of the brain is the part obsessed with ritual and violence, and sometimes there’s little to differentiate between the two. You look at just normal things—fraternity initiations, street gangs, all sorts of things like that. The violence and the ritual eventually so intermingle that you can’t have one without the other; one causes the other.”
“Like rape, Paul,” Natalie said. “Or sex-related murders. Is intercourse or death the purpose of the act, or just something that happens as a result, the act itself being the purpose?”
“I think Behavioral Psych 101 just let out, gang,” Rourke said softly, starting to slow the pickup truck as he wove it between two of the nearest semis and into the circle.
The girl beside him unsnapped the thumbreak opening flap on the holster with the big Python. Rubenstein pulled back the bolt on the “Schmeisser.”
“Be cool,” Rourke cautioned, stopping the pickup truck in the approximate center of the circle. In front of the hood were perhaps fifty people, mostly women and children, a few older men, some of them still in pajamas or nightgowns, their clothes torn, their faces dirty and their eyes filled with terror. Rourke whispered, “This must be the place,” and shut off the key on the pickup truck and swung open the driver’s side door and stepped out, the CAR-15 slung under his right shoulder now, his fist wrapped around the pistol grip.
The knot of townspeople stared at him, almost as though they collectively made one frightened organism. He looked away from them, rolling the cigar in the corner of his mouth, his chin jutting forward, his legs slightly apart. He turned and looked behind the pickup truck. Already perhaps a dozen or more of the motorcyclists from the brigand gang were walking toward him, some of the drivers of the eighteen-wheelers were climbing down from their cabs and walking toward him as well. Rourke squinted against the sun and shot a glance skyward—the entire northwestern quadrant was so gray it almost seemed black by contrast to the deep blue of the sky above him. The wind was picking up, making tiny dust devils around his feet.
“Who the fuck are you?” The voice came from a tall man, Rourke’s height or better, but an easy fifty pounds heavier, wearing a dark blue denim shirt with the sleeves cut off, leaving frayed edges across his rippling shoulder muscles. He wore a military-style shoulder holster, a stag-gripped .45 automatic riding in it on the left side of his chest. In his right hand was a riot shotgun, with extension magazine and a sling, web materialed, blowing now slightly in the wind like the man’s dark, greasy-looking hair.
“Rourke—he’s Paul Rubenstein, the girl’s name is Natalie.” Out of the corner of his left eye, Rourke could see Rubenstein, standing half-inside the cab of the pickup truck, the MP-40 submachine gun held lazily in his left hand across the roof of the cab. The girl was already out of the pickup truck, standing beside Rourke and a little behind him.
“The goddamn names don’t mean shit to me, man—what d’ya want here?”
Rourke sighed, a small cloud of the gray cigar smoke filtering through his nostrils as he rolled the cigar in the corner of his mouth. “Got the paramils after us—we hit a truck back a ways and boosted some ammo and stuff. Killed a coupla their guys gettin’ away—figured you might be able to use a few extra people who could handle a gun. You got those suckers less than a day behind you and you guys leave plenty of tracks,” and Rourke gestured over his right shoulder with the cigar toward the townspeople huddled behind him.
“We got enough people can handle a gun, buddy—what the hell we need you for?”
“You’re amateurs, I’m professional—I’m worth at least any three of your guys.”
“Bullshit,” the big guy laughed. “I’m gonna kill me these little pieces of scared dogshit behind you, then we’ll see just how good you are.”
The big man started forward and Rourke, the cigar back in his mouth, took a step to his right, blocking the big man’s path. “You know,” Rourke whispered, his face inches from the face of the brigand, “you guys are real assholes.”
The brigand turned, his face red with rage, his hands starting to move. Rourke—again whispering— said, “Go ahead—from here I can’t miss,” and he edged the CAR-15 slightly forward, the muzzle almost touching the bigger man’s stomach just above the belt buckle. “See, you guys keep knockin’ off the civilian population, after a while, no matter how many of ’em you kill, they’re gonna finally get just mad enough to band together and come after you guys—then you’ll have them and the paramils on your neck. Same thing happened to the Romans, two thousand years later it happened to the Nazis when they marched into the Ukraine in Russia. How would you like snipers behind every rock, explosives under every bridge? It can happen to you, friend.”