Survivalist - 22 - Brutal Conquest (10 page)

Despite the possibility that the sound would be heard, Natalia slapped the girl hard across the face.

“What the-?”

“Listen to me, Mary Ann,” Natalia said through her clenched teeth. “Sex is something two people have because both people want it, not something a woman does to make an excuse for her to be kept alive. We’re not surrendering to the men in those armored personnel carriers. And they won’t take us without a fight. And, if they take us, the only way they’ll ‘take us’ in the way you are talking about is to kill us or drug us so we’re unconscious. Some men enjoy sex that way—it’s called necrophilia—but most men don’t. If you try anything else, I will kill you. Because you would be better off dead with self-respect than being alive without it. Is that clear?”

Tears streamed down Mary Ann’s cheeks, one redder than the other where Natalia had slapped it. But Mary Ann nodded… .

*

Paul Rubenstein moved through the snow on knees and

elbows, the Schmiesser in both hands just forward of his ? jaw. He was near the height of the rise and did not want

to risk silhouetting himself there and attracting attention. | But he had to make certain that the armored personnel ‘ carriers had moved on far enough ahead to get the

women out of hiding in the snow before they froze to

death.

But, in the next instant, his ears confirmed what his ‘ eyes could not yet see.

The APCs were near.

Finally attaining the height of the rise, he kept his head very low, furrowing out a narrow channel in a ridge of hard-packed snow so he could see.

The machines had stopped. Powerful lights played over , the ground, where there were markings along the way.

Paul pushed his submachine gun onto his back, then uncased the German binoculars. They had vision intensification capabilities and he used that now, careful to avoid looking directly into one of the lights and temporarily blinding himself.

Instead, he focused on the markings in the snow.

‘ As a kid growing up on Air Force bases, it wasn’t the

sort of thing he’d exacdy seen every day. But since The Night Of The War he’d learned a lot of things. And this was one of the simplest.

The markings in the snow were horses’ hoofprints.

There was nothing to suggest that bands of wild horses lived in this barren snow country. That meant that John and Natalia and that crazy girl, Mary Ann, had made f them. And either John or Natalia was out there somewhere on the way back with help.

Paul Rubenstein put down his glasses and waited. There was nothing else he could do.

He had given away most of his warm clothing to the women and wore only a heavy woolen sweater over his thermal shirt. John Thomas Rourke, his body shaking with the cold, lay in the snow.

He suffered from a lack of appropriate equipment. The German assault rifle, firing a caseless cartridge and due for phaseout over the latest energy rifle, was decent but not the sort of thing he liked for a sniping situation. The cartridge was less a potential manstopper than the 5.56mm round used in his CAR-15 and similar AR-15/ M-16 weapons systems. And, it went against his grain for him to enter into a sniping situation with the necessity to burst fire.

Yet, he could not trust one solitary round to do the job of nailing a man wearing heavy winter gear.

The rifle did not meet the terrain and situation requirements.

His alternatives to the rifle were less than satisfactory. There were nine men in the party. Although the quality of the arms they carried could not be vouched for, the abundance of them was obvious through his binoculars.

Indeed, so much less than satisfactory were his alternatives that they ceased to exist.

John Rourke brought the rifle to his shoulder. It didn’t have the feel of the Steyr-Mannlicher SSG, nor even that of his CAR-15 or an ordinary M-16. The stock, a bullpup type, was ideal for close range maneuverability, but less than ideal for precision riflery.

And John Rourke suddenly wondered if he were becoming an anachronism.

He lived in a world so far removed from his own time that the only things about it which seemed at all familiar were brutality, greed, and the occasional incident of human nobility.

If he could save Sarah, somehow…. He had never realized how much he loved her until she was gone. His desire for Natalia—it was love, genuine enough—was not what he felt for his wife. He desired Sarah. He loved Sarah. And, unlike Natalia, Sarah was a part of him and he was a part of her, too. If—he wanted to believe in when—but if he could bring her back, he would go with her someplace and start all over again, leaving this behind them.

He had fought for longer than any man had ever fought.

And he was tired of fighting.

Peace on Earth would only be achieved when man was absent from Earth. Perhaps he was becoming a cynic, but at least he was being honest with himself. As long as one man had something another did not, there would he strife. To make all men totally, absolutely equal—the dream of Marxists and Utopians and others since the beginning of the modern era and likely well earlier than that—was impossible except when gauged by the lowest common denominator. All men could be poor, all men could be without property or substance, all men could be denied the most basic of human freedoms, all men could be slaves.

And that was the only way.

Equality under the law and equality in fact were two entirely different matters. All men were, in fact, created equal.

They became what they became, some good and some bad. But most were somewhere between the two opposite poles of morality, most litde concerned with anything outside their own immediate sphere.

People were and always would be, as long as they were people, ready to kill.

The immediate now was as fine an example of that truth as he could have conceived of. His life was more valuable to him than the lives of the nine men who pursued him. His life was valuable to him not only because of his desire to continue living, but also because hinged upon his survival were the lives of several people he loved.

Toward the end of living for himself and for those he loved, he had now to take something that only God could return in the hereafter. He’d taken many lives and, as long as he lived, would likely be forced to continue the practice.

What was wrong with the world was definitely the infestation that lived upon it.

“Bitter, John Rourke?” John Rourke queried of himself and the night.

There was no response. He already knew the answer and the night ignored him.

Through the litde integral scope in the rifle’s carrying handle, he watched the first man he would shoot.

He could not see the face clearly. That was good.

Port Reno, Nevada, to Emma Shaw’s way of thinking, was the drain trap beneath Earth’s toilet. At least the same sort of thing accumulated there.

A cold wind blew out of the mountains and she snapped up the collar of her bomber jacket. Marie Hayes and Ward Aldridge flanked her. As they turned the corner, a litde boy ran up to them. “Hey, want some sex?” He took a step back from them and the sandwich screen image on his chest was more easily visible. “Whatchya like?” And then he looked at Marie.

He touched one of the buttons on the console carried on a plastic belt at his waist, just beneath the screen, and the image flickered. There were two women, one Chinese and the other white. They were naked except for studded black leather dog collars and they were going at each other as if there were no tomorrow.

Ward Aldridge asked, “Can women really do that to one another?”

The boy pushed another button. At least his sandwich screens had something for every taste. The subject this time was a black woman, evidendy to appeal to Ward, and she was having sex with a machine. There were machine sex shops all over Port Reno, of course, and all over the “civilized” world as well. The machines themselves were bisexual, one end fitted with a realistic-looking dildo

and the other with a realistic-looking vaginal-like opening. They were pneumatic and could keep going longer than their customers could, as long as enough coins of whatever realm were deposited to keep the power turned on.

“Get lost, little guy,” Emma told the kid. The boy shrugged his skinny shoulders and walked off. The backside of the sandwich screen showed a different program, quick cuts of something that looked like a Roman orgy with titles superimposed for the name of the “Ranch,” these in English, Russian, Chinese, and German, the four principal languages.

There was even a road map showing how to get to the establishment.

Emma dug her hands into her jacket pockets and walked on.

Along the strip, the boy with his sandwich screens blended in with at least a half dozen other kids of similar size and age and in the same racket. People were everywhere, a good percentage of them prostitutes of every description, including women in male drag and men in female drag.

The casinos were lit up so brighdy that it was almost possible to forget it was night.

” ‘All Nude Review.’ There you go, I’m gone,” Ward Aldridge laughed. Then he really did stop walking, just staring up at the video marquee.

Emma Shaw had to admit the girls looked beautiful. She looked at Ward Aldridge and asked him, “So, why are you waiting?”

“Hey, I just don’t know if I should leave—”

“Two unescorted ladies to fend for themselves?” Marie queried.

Ward shrugged his big shoulders and grinned good-naturedly.

“Two unescorted United States Armed forces officers?” Marie pressed. Tm a Marine like you, remember? I can look after Emma, seeing she’s only Navy. So, what’s your problem?”

Emma was more compassionate to Ward Aldridge’s moral dilemma and his male ego. She said, “Look, Ward, we’ve all got beepers and even if we wanted to, regs say we can’t hit this port unless we’re armed. So, we’re fine. But, if you get in trouble, just hit your beeper and we’ll bail you out, okay?” Emma added, laughing.

His black skin looked almost purple under the neon lights as he said, “I mean it. You guys be careful, okay?”

Emma took a step back and placed her right hand over her heart. “Honest injun, Ward. Marie and I were on our way to the public library, anyway.”

“No public library here, girl,” Ward laughed, then shot them a wave as he started in under the marquee.

Then he was gone, lost in the crowd. Emma took her hands out of her pockets and rubbed them together. “So, Marie! Which way to the library?”

“Yeah, right,” Marie answered, starting to laugh. “How about some food? Then we can figure out what we wanna do.”

“So long as it’s not Chinese. Around here, God knows what you’d be eating in the chop suey.” “Amen,” Marie laughed.

Emma spotted a flashing neon sign, smaller than most of the others. But its message struck a peculiarly respondent note in her heart. “Pizza!”

Together, they ran across the strip, dodging the electric cars and the horse carriages.

John Rourke gradually increased the pressure against the bullpup-actioned assault rifle’s unsatisfactory single trigger.

The rifle moved almost not at all as the cartridge fired. As he had suspected, the sights were a litde off. The bullet he’d aimed for the first man’s neck struck through

the jaw. “Shit,” Rourke murmured, summing up his sentiments as he swung the muzzle of the rifle, setded the scope—he didn’t quite like its universal eye relief—and fired again. He held a litde low on this shot, aiming for a midpoint between the sternum and the Adam’s apple of his second man. The bullet tore through the Adam’s apple.

The first man’s horse, the man still alive and clinging to it, raced past Rourke’s field of view. Rourke took a quick shot, hitting the man somewhere in center of mass, pitching him out of the saddle.

He fired his fourth round on the third man, again one of the ones farther from his position. The shot buckled the man over but didn’t knock him out of the saddle. It took a fifth shot to do that.

John Rourke had always detested sloppiness but prided himself on meeting the parameters of whatever situation arose. He flicked the rifle’s selector to full auto.

Gunfire, ill aimed, came toward Rourke’s position as he fired on the fourth man, punching him out of the saddle with a five round burst.

The fifth man was aiming some sort of rifle—or trying to at least—the animal under him jostling side to side, making accurate fire impossible.

John Rourke was solidly embedded in snow-covered rocks. When he fired, the rifle flew from “the fifth man’s hands and the man’s body tumbled back out of the saddle and across his horse’s flanks, the animal rearing with the sudden shifting of weight and pressure.

Two of the men were out of the saddle, firing long guns. A couple of bullets zinged across the rocks about three feet from Rourke’s position.

Rourke returned fire, two bursts to each man, putting the men down dead or close to death. He rolled onto his back, tearing the partially spent magazine from the assault rifle’s action, sliding a fresh forty-rounder up the well. There was already a round chambered.

Rourke swung back into position as the last two men, both on foot, fell to cover.

The burst of gunfire that tore into the rocks and snow a few inches from Rourke’s face was either the act of a decent marksman or dumb luck. Rourke wouldn’t gamble on the latter. He laid down suppressive fire, keeping the two men at bay. One of them ran from cover. Rourke fired and missed. The man grabbed for his animal, put a pistol to its head, and fired, crashing the beast down, then dropping behind it for cover.

The two survivors had a modest cross-fire position now, and if they eventually got the range right, Rourke might find himself in trouble.

Rourke sprayed out the rest of the assault rifle’s magazine, the dead horse’s body bouncing with the multiple impacts, some of the bullets getting through fat and tissue, however. The man behind the horse seemed to stand upright for a split second, then fell back, his rifle discharging in a long burst into the already-mutilated animal.

One man remained.

John Rourke loaded a fresh magazine up the well, then brought his weapon back on line.