Survivalist - 12 - The Rebellion (18 page)

vinyl of the seat. He reached under her clothes and found her underpants, then pulled them down, along her thighs, over her knees.

Forrest Blackburn looked at her and laughed. “Get you cold enough—even you’ll want a little warmth, Annie. Be back in a while.” He slammed the door.

Nearly naked from the waist down, humiliated, frightened—she began to cry. But there was another word. She felt its meaning behind her tears. Defiance.

“Paul—answer me, damnit!” “John?”

“No—Michael. What the hell happened?” He watched as Paul Rubenstein opened his eyes. “Michael.”

“They—they brought you in here unconscious. Something about Annie?”

Madison, her voice soft, low, began, “I told Michael he should not get out of bed.”

“I’m all right,” Michael snapped, leaning back on his perch at the edge of the cot where Paul Rubenstein lay. He had lain on his back since his surgery and working his stomach muscles pained him. His back ached as well from where his father had dug out some of the Soviet bullets.

Michael Rourke eased back further, standing then to rid himself of the pain, leaning against the center post of the tent, Madison beside him suddenly, her shawl falling from her shoulders as Michael looked at her. She reached to support him. “I’m all right, Madison,” Michael Rourke almost whispered.

That his voice was like that of his father’s was something he had been told before and that his own observation confirmed. But his father was not here—and his sister’s fate perhaps rested on his and Paul’s shoulders. And he looked at Madison—with Madison too.

Paul was sitting up, propped on his right elbow, his face very pale.

“What’s, ah, what’s going on, Paul,” Michael began again. “Dr. Munchen brought you in—looked at me too. He looked at Madison—he told her he was good at looking in a woman’s eyes and telling if she were pregnant.”

Madison laughed. “No one can do such a thing—but I do, I do have life here,” and she touched at her abdomen.

Paul shook his head. And then Paul sat up straight, his face showing pain. His right hand came from his hip pocket, a gleaming stainless steel derringer in it. “Munchen ‘s a good guy—he knew I had this.”

“What’s goin’ on, Paul? Where’s Annie?”

“Munchen didn’t tell you?”

“What—”

“Annie, ahh, Forrest Blackburn. He’s the Russian agent. He kidnapped Annie—took a Soviet chopper and headed out. Ahh, Dodd—I think it was him. Said Blackburn couldn’t get much more than a hundred miles or so— not enough fuel. But he, ahh, won’t send anybody after her.”

“We can go,” Michael Rourke declared. “I can lie just as flat in the back of Dad’s truck as I can here.”

“And I can drive this truck,” Madison volunteered.

Michael Rourke folded his arm about his woman’s shoulders and drew her head against his chest. “You probably could.”

Paul was sitting up fully now. “All right—this is what we do. I use this,” and Paul Rubenstein gestured with the derringer, “and we get ourselves John’s truck. I left that spare High Power I picked up—at The Place,” and Paul smiled at Madison, then turned his face away. “Left that and some spare magazines and stuff in the truck. Just in case. We know where the strategic stores were located— Blackburn doesn’t. We can catch him after that fuckin’ machine of his runs outa gas.”

“Madison 11 stay—I can drive,” Michael said grimly. He could barely stand.

“Well, I don’t think so, Michael. And your dad wouldn’t leave Madison alone here without someone to protect her— and he wouldn’t take off all shot up with another guy in pretty much the same way and leave the only healthy person behind.”

“Madison’s pregnant, Paul.”

“Good for her—if this were six months from now I’d agree with you. But it isn’t—and I don’t.”

Michael exhaled a long sigh, finally easing down to his cot, Madison raising his legs, swinging his feet up onto the cot. Michael leaned back, straight, flat in his back, staring at the tent roof. “All right—you’ve got the experience, I haven’t.”

“Yeah, but you’re a Rourke.” Paul Rubenstein laughed, clutching at his abdomen.

Michael turned away again, looking upward. “What do we do?”

“All right,” Paul began.

But Madison interrupted. It must be catching from Annie, Michael thought.

“I can take the derringer pistol—that is correct?”

“Yeah,” Michael almost whispered. “But, no, you can t.

“Hear her out, huh?” Paul interjected.

Michael turned to look at her as she gathered up her shawl from the floor of the tent and cocooned it about her shoulders and upper body, then hugged her arms to her chest. She began to pace and he watched her—her long blond hair would swing to the left, her skirts to the right, and then vice-versa, as she walked. “I can take Annie’s pistol and go to Father Rourke’s truck. If it is unguarded, I will drive the truck here. If it is guarded, I will do something so it is not guarded any longer.” Paul laughed. Madison stared at him a moment, then swept her hair back

from her face, continuing to talk. “I will return here and Paul and I can help you Michael—into the truck. We can then go to Captain Dodd and ask for the return of our guns. If he does not, well, then we shall steal them.” And she nodded her head, as if deciding something, and then she smiled. “Is this good?”

Paul Rubenstein’s face lit with a grin as Michael watched him. Paul laughed. “You know, Michael, your dad was right. We’ll make a Rourke out of her yet.” And Paul seemed to weigh the derringer in his hand. “All right, Madison—this is an American Derringer Corporation .45 ACP 0/U derringer. John—Father Rourke, like you call him—he showed me once how these big-bore derringers work. The trick is to make sure the firing pins are set so the bottom barrel goes off first. That’ll be your most accurate shot.”

“Yes, Paul.”

John Rourke carried a briefcase—many men he had seen throughout The Complex carried similar briefcases. But John Rourke doubted that the contents were similar at all. In the briefcase was his Metalifed and Mag-Na-Ported six-inch Colt Python .357, and with it Safariland speedloaders loaded with Federal 158-grain semi-jacketed soft points. With it as weU were the twin stainless Detonics Scoremaster .45s he had liberated from The Place—there had been no way to return them, no one to return them to. Spare magazines for these as well as spare magazines for the twin stainless Detonics Combat Masters in the double Alessi shoulder rig under his waist-length jacket were in the briefcase as well.

The briefcase was heavy.

As he walked the narrow, spotless sidewalks, he could see ahead of him Frau Mann and Natalia and his wife, Sarah, the three women dressed to kill and out, it would have seemed, for nothing but a casual stroll. How Frau Mann was armed, he did not know. But Natalia’s twin stainless L-Frame .357s were in the large leather-looking purse that hung so innocent-seeming from her left shoulder. The silenced PPK/S would be there as well. He knew where the Bali-Song was: under an improvised elastic garter inside her left thigh.

Sarah—the Trapper Scorpion she had adopted between

The Night of The War and the time he, John Rourke, had finally located his wife and two children. It was in her purse, and with it the battered, rust pitted 1911A1 she had carried since The Night of The War.

Rourke stopped at a shop window. He spoke German better than he read it, but the books in the shop window all seemed to have been written by the leader or written about the leader. Rourke saw his reflection smiling back at him from the glass—such books might soon become collector’s items. And past his own reflection, curiously superimposed over a poster of the very Hitlerlike face of the leader, he could see the reflection of Wolfgang Mann, although he would not have recognized it had he not known. Mann wore a tight twenty-fifth century version of a business suit, the suit having seen vastly better days. A white wig and false mustache and a crushed cap, stooping shoulders and a cane accentuating the appearance of age. Mann’s face would be the most recognizable and therefore had to be the one that was altered.

Rourke walked on, passing the bookstore—under Mann’s arm had been a crumpled bundle. Inside the bundle was Mann’s service pistol and a half dozen spare magazines. The cane was a sword, a relic preserved for five hundred years from his ancestor who had fought under Hitler against freedom, now to be used against Hitler’s hen-apparent in the cause of freedom if necessary.

There was, after all, a certain poetry to life, John Rourke mused.

He kept walking, watching ahead of him now—the three women further along because he had stopped for a moment at the bookstore window. Frau Mann, Natalia and Sarah were nearly to the exit of The Complex.

Sarah Rourke felt suddenly strange as she saw the reflection in the window of the dress shop. With Frau

Mann and Natalia, she had stopped to see the latest in Complex fashions. And somehow, seeing her own reflection in a shop window was somehow different than seeing herself in a mirror.

Subconsciously, after she had dressed in the clothes Frau Mann had provided for her, as she had watched herself in the mirror, it had all seemed unreal. An expensively made dress. Heels. Jewelry. Her hair up. Makeup—she had almost forgotten how it felt to wear lipstick. And now she wore eye shadow.

But suddenly seeing herself with two other women doing something that had once been so perfectly normal. It frightened her.

If her husband were successful here and the leader were deposed—would there be warfare here? Would these women—like Frau Mann and Helene Sturm whom they were on their way to rescue if possible—still have their shop windows to gaze in? Admiring what they did not have and perhaps more subtly admiring what they already possessed in themselves?

Her husband—she considered John Rourke. They had made love. He had ejaculated. She had felt it, sensed it— experienced it, and been happy for it. It crossed her mind. She should have been at her most fertile.

She wondered—not suddenly, but lingeringly and almost happily. What if even now she were pregnant by him?

Sarah Rourke licked her lips—tasting the lipstick, tasting something else she could not define.

Natalia, beside her, as exquisite a woman as Sarah had ever seen, began again to walk, and Sarah fell in between Natalia and Frau Mann. She thought of herself as a thorn between two roses. Frau Mann too was exquisite.

Natalia or Frau Mann—either of them could have been a model from the pages of Vogue. She tried to remember the last time she had seen a copy of Vogue. She remembered. It had been at the dentist’s office when Annie had

chipped a baby tooth.

If she were pregnant—they were approaching the entrance to The Complex and there were guards there—if it were a boy, all would be ideal for him. A Rourke, a natural leader like her husband and like her son. A man in a world where the manly virtues were what would make civilization take hold. But if it were a girl—then a woman, one of those who took civilization and made it stick after it had been planted. But it was not a world to be a woman in, Sarah reflected.

They were walking into the sunlight now, Frau Mann chatting idly in German with Natalia, Natalia responding. Sarah only nodded hopelessly and stupidly because she did not speak the language. What were they talking about? Nothing of consequence, because the German soldiers were too near. They would be talking about what was expected of them—hemlines and recipes and the sort of prattle that she, Sarah, had always detested.

But if she were pregnant—one of the guards saluted Frau Mann and Frau Mann stopped to talk with him. Sarah caught the introduction and smiled at the soldier. If she were pregnant, would it force John to give up all hope of Natalia? Did she, Sarah, really want that?

She had learned to live independent of him, to fend for herself. To be her own person and not live under the shadow of his greatness and his strength. She had found strength inside herself. And now was she perhaps forcing him through biological necessity to be with her?

What would he give up?

What would she give up?

Was it already given? But she loved him.

John Rourke stopped again, because the women had stopped, and he let Wolfgang Mann who was disguised as an old man pass him by.

He stared in a shop window. Cutlery. He saw no knife he would trade either his Gerber Mkll or his Sting IA for. And he smiled. He had noticed, however subtly, that as Natalia and Sarah and Frau Mann had walked past the shop window, Natalia’s head had turned almost imperceptibly. He saw no knife for which she would trade her Pacific Cutlery Bali-Song, despite its five centuries of use.

Natalia. Sarah.

He studied what was apparently the contemporary counterpart of the Victorinox Swiss Army Knives—a display of them, blades of all sizes, descriptions, functions.

Had he made Sarah pregnant? Why had he made love to her? Because he still loved her—of this he was resolutely certain. It had been all that had kept his sanity during those times between The Night of The War and when he had found her.

He wondered what she thought of him.

John Rourke had always felt discomfort in the objective realization that those about him - saw him as tireless, possessing courage without measure. A hero. He saw it in Paul’s face, in Michael’s face, in Annie’s. In Natalia’s eyes.

He had never considered himself more than ordinary, and in some ways less. Ever since childhood he had retreated from humanity into reticence—it was interpreted as silent strength. His singularity of purpose was to avoid contemplating the alternative. That he planned ahead was his basic distrust in the efficacy of others. Confidence was a defense against the mass ineptitude of the world.

He valued Paul—courage, understanding, that rare love one man can show for another in friendship.

Natalia.His friend as well. But more—because she was a more sensuous lover than he, John Rourke, had ever imagined. But he had little more than touched her in all the time he had known her.

Sarah—he and his wife were unalike. But they loved. Had loved.

He found himself staring at a hunting knife with plastic handles—gone were stag or ivory.