Sarah Rourke looked carefully on each side of the center of the street and saw no one—just the four men and two women torturing Ron Jenkins. One of the men was black, as was one of the women. There was another pickup truck parked a few yards away from the one to which Ron Jenkins was lashed, but it appeared empty to her. She moved the selector of the AR-15 to the unmarked full-auto position—the gun had been illegally altered by the man she’d taken it from.
She got up to her knees, then rose to her feet, the rifle snugged to her shoulder.
“Don’t move—any of you. I’ve got you covered with an automatic rifle,” she announced at the top of her lungs, “Now step away from him!”
“Well, well,” the black man shouted back, turning to face her. “We cut your sign earlier—figured if we grabbed your man here you’d soon come along to get him. You can have him too, all we want is your horses—and maybe somethin’ else. He don’t look like much for a girl like you—tits like I bet you got under that T-shirt I guess could set a fella like me just on fire, sweet thing.” The black man laughed, then started walking toward her. “Now, gimme that ol’ gun before I whip your white ass with it for being bad to me, hear?”
Sarah Rourke touched her finger to the trigger of the modified AR-15 and shot the black man in the face, then brought the muzzle around and started firing at the remaining three men and two women. They started to run, only one of them starting to shoot back at her. She fired at him and he threw both his hands up to his face.
She shot one of the women in the back as the woman tried making it into the pickup truck, shot another of the men in the head as he jumped into the back of the furthest truck, which was already in motion. The black woman was in the cab. The last man was running to catch it and Sarah fired, a three-shot burst which she felt—oddly—proud of herself for being able to control. She’d drawn a three-point bullet hole line across the man’s back and he’d fallen forward on his face as the truck had sped away.
She almost automatically changed magazines for the rifle, set the selector back to safe and took the pistol out, her thumb over the raised safety catch, the hammer cocked. She ran to Ron Jenkins, glancing over the dead as she did to make sure they were dead.
She dropped to her knees beside him, setting the AR-15 onto the ground and raising his head with her left hand. “Ron—it’s all right. I’ll get you out of this,” she said.
Eyes opened and staring past her, she could hear him whisper, “I’m not gonna—gonna make it, Mrs. Rourke. Take care of Carla and Millie—get ’em to Mount Eagle. God bless you—’cause them killers is gonna be back here sure as I’m—” and his eyes kept staring but there was a rattling sound in his throat and his breath suddenly smelled bad to her. She took her hand from his face, got to her feet and stepped a pace back. She stared at him a moment. “You’re dead—Mr. Jenkins,” she said hoarsely. “You’re dead.”
Chapter Eight
There was gunfire by the border crossing, Rourke decided as he turned his motorcycle into the side street and pulled up alongside the curb.
“What’s all that shooting?” Rubenstein queried.
“Either some of them—Mexicans—are trying to get across the border into here—which would be damned foolish just now—or a pile of Americans are trying to get across into Mexico—which would be just the reverse of the usual situation, wouldn’t it. White Anglo-Saxon Protestant wetbacks.”
“Jess—you were right about this place. Everything,” and Rubenstein turned around in his seat and stared at the buildings lining both sides of the street, “looks like it’s been looted fifty times.”
“Somethin’ to do, I guess,” Rourke commented, staring behind them, as if somehow he could watch the gunfight around the corner and beyond. Then, turning and looking up the street ahead of them, Rourke whispered, “Quiet a minute.”
The sound was a rumbling, growing louder by the second, it seemed. “What is it?” Rubenstein asked, staring into the empty street.
“Shh!” Rourke whispered. He was silent for another moment, then slowly, glancing behind him, said to Rubenstein, “Sounds like a riot maybe—some kind of a mob heading toward us. Let’s get out of here.” Rourke started turning his bike, Rubenstein behind him. Glancing up the street, Rourke watched as the mob turned into it—men, women, even some children, hands and arms flailing in the air, some carrying clubs, guns discharging into the air space and empty buildings around them.
“They—nuts?” Rubenstein stammered, his voice and look filled with astonishment.
“Maybe desperate’s a better word—like I said, it’s somethin’ to do—isn’t it?” Rourke wheeled his bike and gunned the engine back down the street, slowing at the corner, balancing the bike as he scanned the street in both directions, Rubenstein beside him again.
“Can’t go back the way we came—look,” and Rourke pointed in the direction leading out of the city. “Either another mob or part of the same one,” he commented.
“But there’s a gunfight down the other way by the border.”
“Maybe they won’t notice us,” Rourke said— smiling, then started the Harley under him into the street, Rubenstein beside him on his left. Rourke cruised slowly over the pavement, guiding his bike around stray bricks and rocks and broken glass, cutting all the way left to avoid a pool of stagnant water swamping the right gutter and overflowing into the street. Rourke and Rubenstein rounded the corner, Rourke pulling to a halt in the middle of the street. He glanced behind him—the sound of the mob was barely audible now over the sound of the gunfire ahead, but already Rourke could see the first phalanxes of the mob behind him coming into the street which they’d just left. Ahead was the main border crossing into Juarez—and from across the river Rourke could hear gunfire as well, see the smoke of buildings afire there.
“Is this what’s left of the world—my God!” Rubenstein exclaimed.
“It may sound like some kind of put-on,” Rourke said slowly, “but I expected worse. And don’t worry who you shoot at—they’ll all be shooting at us—kind of like a diversion for them. Let’s ride,” and Rourke gunned his motorcycle, glancing back over his shoulder toward Rubenstein. Already, Rourke’s fist was curled around the pistol grip of the CAR-15 slung under his shoulder.
Chapter Nine
Rubenstein jerked back the bolt on the Schmeisser 9mm submachine gun, checked the safety and gunned his motorcycle ahead, John Rourke’s tall lean frame bent over the big Harley Davidson already several yards ahead of him. With the back of his hand, Rubenstein pushed his wire-rimmed glasses up off the bridge of his nose, bending low over his handlebars, his sparse black hair whipping across his smooth sunburnt forehead. He repeated to himself what Rourke had told him—”Don’t fire that thing like it’s a garden hose, practice trigger control.” Rubenstein had asked what the spare magazines were for. Rourke had simply told him to sit on his motorcycle, hold the handlebars with one hand and the MP-40 subgun with the other. Then Rourke had reached over and pulled out the magazine. He’d stuck it in the saddlebag on the right side of the bike and said, “Okay—without taking that hand off the handlebar and without dropping the gun, reload.”
Rubenstein had tried for a few moments, then looked at Rourke in exasperation. “That’s why,” Rourke had said, “you need more than one gun, and that’s why with all your guns you only fire at something, not just to make noise. And with a full-auto weapon like that you confine yourself to three-shot bursts.” Rubenstein had mimicked Rourke then: “I know—practice trigger control—right?”
And now, as Rubenstein rounded a curve in the street, watching the armed men huddled along the supports for the bridge leading into Mexico and the other armed men across the wide square in building doorways and smashed-out windows, he repeated to himself, “Trigger control… trigger control.”
The speedometer on his bike was only hovering around thirty or thirty-five, he noticed, but as he caught sight of the street beneath him, the pavement seeming to race past, it seemed as though he were doing a hundred or better. Rourke was already firing his CAR-15. It looked to Rubenstein like a long-barreled space gun with the scope mounted on the carrying handle and the stock retracted—like a ray gun in a movie about outer space.
As Rubenstein reached the middle of the square, gunfire started raining down toward him and he leveled the Schmeisser at the closest group of shooters and fired back, repeating aloud at the top of his voice so he could hear himself over the noise of the shots, “Trigger control… trigger control… trigger—”