by Jerry Ahern
“Dad,” Michael laughed.
Annie only smiled.
“Move up from those .38s out of my Python— start into .357 Magnums. Don’t get hooked on single action revolvers like your brother.” “I like that Detonics Scoremaster you let me try once—it’s pretty and it’s accurate.”
“Fine—but wait a few years before you get into
it, and the gun is yours.”
“All right.” She smiled, the corners of her mouth dimpling. He looked at Michael. “I’m not sounding chauvinistic—at least I hope not. But you’re two years older, and you’re a man. Fourteen is a rough age to start being a man, but you started when you were younger than that and saved your mother’s life with those Brigands, helped your mother and Annie out of that swollen lake when the dam burst. You’ve got an ego I haven’t seen the like of since my own. That can be a positive feature if you can control it. A negative feature if you can’t. But you’ll be in charge. I think Annie accepts that,” and Rourke looked at his daughter. She smiled, laughing a little, but nodded. He looked back to Michael. “If I didn’t think you could handle it, I wouldn’t say you were in charge. You’re the one responsible for yourself, your sister and, while we sleep, for the four of us. And when you work with that smokeless powder you’re experimenting with, don’t blow yourself up.” He looked at his son and laughed. Michael stood up, stabbing his hands into the side pockets of his Levi’s, the cuffs turned up because they were Levi’s Rourke had put in the Retreat to wear for himself and Michael was not yet his height. “I won’t let Annie down—I won’t let you, or Mom, or Paul or Natalia down. I don’t know how smooth it’s gonna go for the next sixteen years, but it’ll be all right.” John Rourke stood, Michael Rourke walking toward him. John Rourke outstretched his right hand to his son. His son took it. Annie stood up, embracing them both. In a few hours, John Rourke would sleep again.
Chapter Seven
The scoped Stalker slung diagonally across his back, Michael Rourke started down from the rocks, into the valley, the Retreat—his father had told him once that^Jatalia Tiemerovna referred to it as “Rourke’s Mountain”—in the distance. He had begun ranging the mountains surrounding the Retreat when he was twenty and in nearly ten years, he had seen no sign of animal life, but the vegetation—where it grew at all—was thicker and lusher with each spring. He quickened his pace— Annie, who had turned into a superb cook, was fixing meat. It was a special-occasion delicacy usually—for his birthday or her own, but this was not January, the month of both their birthdays. Annie, that morning, had simply said, “I’m tired of being a vegetarian—I’m taking some meat out of one of the freezers. Make sure you’re not late for dinner.” Michael Rourke hadn’t argued.
A rabbit or a squirrel—had he seen one, he would not have shot it, but attempted to follow it.
^ He would have brought such an animal food from their gardens. But no such animal existed.
No birds flew in the sky. No insect buzzed.
Some type of beetle to attack the vegetables in the gardens would have been welcome, but there were none.
Perhaps in other parts of the world, or at lower a altitudes—perhaps. He had taken one of the three Harley Davidson Low Riders once, taken it far from the Retreat. That had been five years ago. He had ranged for more than a hundred miles in the four cardinal directions. He had found the rusted, gutted remains of an automobile. He had found the ruins of what had once been a city—skeletons of buildings now. Not even a human bone survived. But the strategic fuel supplies were intact—it had been the announced reason for the trip. He had checked two of the reserves and they still held their precious gasoline.
Annie would range from the Retreat as well at times. He didn’t worry that terribly much for his sister. She had begun mastery of the Detonics Scoremaster .45 she had liked so much, begun its mastery when she was fifteen. At twenty-eight— almost—she was a superlative shot. At one hundred yards, without a scope, using just the Bo-Mar iron sight, she could consistently hit objects Michael could barely see with the naked eye.
They had begun reading through the Bntannica when in their late teens. He had reached the end of volume seventeen of the Macropaedia and found it amusing to read the information concerning tax laws. Taxes were no more. Michael remembered an expression his father had used once—something regarding the in-evitability of death and taxes. Taxes were no longer inevitable. He wondered if death were.
The thought was vaguely disquieting to him that he had known more people who were now dead than still alive. As best he had been able to ascertain in nearly sixteen years of monitoring the airwaves on the Retreat radio, Qf studying the stars and the daytime sky as well, of searching the ground for the slightest sign, no one else lived on the earth.
He had been tempted once to take one of the Harleys and drive/toward Colorado where the Soviet Womb had Keen. But if anyone had survived there, they would likely be his enemies now as they had been his father’s enemies almost five centuries earlier.
At night, when he monitored the radio or studied the stars through the telescope, he would sometimes sit with a glass of the corn-based whiskey—it was quite good now and, at least to him, the taste was as pleasing as the occasional glass of Seagram’s Seven; other times he would stare at the cryogenic chambers. Annie would always fall asleep earlier than he, perhaps while they watched a film together on the video recorder. But there were the alone times—and as he watched the cryogenic chambers, he would consider what it would be like when there were no longer just two people walking the earth, but six instead. As he walked along the mountain road leading to the Retreat now, he wondered again. What was the woman Natalia like?
He remembered from his early childhood seeing his mother and father kiss. From films, he had seen others. One film in particular—the man and the woman lay in bed beside one another. He was not sexually ignorant of the technical aspect of it—he had read, his father in his wisdom having provided things for them both. And before his father had slept, his father had told them both things, answered questions.
But he watched the woman Natalia sometimes, wondering. And he wondered at his father’s remarks about the imperative of all six of them surviving.
Michael Rourke sometimes thought that he thought like his father—and if he did, he realized, then he knew what his father planned and it alternately warmed and frightened him… “I got the recipe from that cookbook Mom wrote once. What do you think?” Michael Rourke put down the glass of Sea-gram’s—it was, after all, a special occasion. “I liked it, Annie. What did you call it again?” “Beef Stroganov. But I didn’t have any wine, so I used some of your homemade beer.”
“Terrific. The man who marries you—“ and Michael Rourke shut up. He watched his sister’s brown eyes, brown like his. She moved her hair—she kept it at waist length—back from her face. “What do you think Dad has planned?” she asked, her voice soft—like Michael remembered his mother’s voice being soft. “You want my honest opinion?”
“Yeah, I want your honest opinion. I’m gonna get dessert. Strawberry shortcake—come on and refill your glass.” She stood up, walking back toward the stove and the counter beside it. Michael climbed down from the stool, taking her empty glass as well as his. He passed her, standing at the nearer counter, untwisting the cap on the bottle. “What do you think? You want some more 500-year-old whiskey?”
“Talk about aging! Am I gonna need some more whiskey?” / “Might not be a bad idea.”
“All right.” She paused. “I’ll have some more whiskey. You want a lot of strawberries?”
“Yeah.”
He poured the second glass, closed the bottle and turned to watch her as she fixed the strawberry shortcake, ladling freshly cut strawberries which they had grown themselves onto the chunks of cornbread. She was dressed as she usually dressed. Rarely did she wear pants, although she was so talented that she could easily have made more than the few pairs she had fabricated. His father—their father—had provided before the
Night of The War bolts of material and thread and a sewing machine and all the necessary accessories. Annie had taken Aft to using the machine like a pianist would take to a concert-tuned piano. He had read about concerts, pianists and the like, watched the videotape of a concert several times. And he listened to music incessantly, as did Annie. But she wore one of her typical in idea If-length full skirts, navy blue in color. And a blouse which seemed to hold up on her shoulders by friction—he had read a novel where such a garment had been described as a “peasant blouse.” This was her usual attire. He watched her as she carried the dessert back to the main counter.
He followed her, crossing to the far side of the counter and straddling the stool. He scratched his bare left thigh where it itched beneath the ragged edge of the cut-off Levi’s. There were still more pairs of these in the storeroom than he could wear through in a lifetime, but these old ones were comfortable for sitting around the Retreat at night.
“So—what do you think he has planned for us?”
“Salud,” he murmured, raising his glass. He had studied Spanish from books and audio tapes and—again his father had provided—watched the one Spanish language movie in the tape library innumerable times.
“Salud, already.” And Annie clinked glasses with him. “So, what do you think?” He wished that he smoked, so he could have lit a cigar or cigarette and delayed saying what he felt. “All right.”
But he didn’t smoke. “He always talked about the six of us being vital for survival.”
“AH right—so?”
“So—you’ve probably seen me—I’ve seen you do it—“ “What do you mean? What are you talking about?” “I’m talking about being human.”
“Michael!”
“I think he planned this all along, from the first time that he learned what was going to happen to end the world. That’s why he awakened us, spent only five years with us and then slept1. He planned it.”
“What do you—“
“When you look at Paul Rubenstein, in his chamber—what do you think of?”
“That he’s—“ I
“That’s he’s a man? The only man who isn’t your blood relative?” Michael Rourke watched his sister. She looked down at her dessert, playing with it with her spoon, not eating it. “I think about that,” she whispered. And she looked up then. “And what about Natalia?”
“I think that she’s a woman,” he answered, his voice almost a whisper. Michael Rourke looked behind him, at the four cryogenic chambers which dominated the great room—the two others had been put away into the storage area. He looked at the face of the woman Natalia—he remembered something suddenly. Her blue eyes.
Michael turned away—Annie continued to stare at the cryogenic chambers. And he knew what she stared at. “Did he—did he—“ Michael Rourke didn’t answer her, his sister.
Chapter Eight
It lasted only a minuscule amount of time, but as soon as it began, Michael Rourke hit the buttons for play and record—the radio made sound. Words.
As he listened, he tried to understand them—the words—but the language was alien to him.
He checked the Rolex Submariner his father had given him before taking the sleep. The transmis-sion lasted approximately two and one-half minutes. Annie was already in bed.
The radio had yielded words only twice in all the time he had monitored it. Once nearly five years earlier. Once now.
He had put the words off as an errant transmis-sion bounced back from some object in space. The transmission had been vastly weaker five years ago. It was strong this night.
‘ ‘The Eden Project?” he asked himself. Had they come back, entered Earth’s orbit? Was it a message? Was it that he could not understand the language? Or that the transmission was so garbled as to be unintelligible, the fault of atmospheric disturbance, or the fault of his equipment? He had stripped the radio with Annie’s help several times, searching—in vain—for some fault in the receiver itself.
There had been none that he could discern.
It was impulse, but he had learned to obey that sometimes. He snatched up the Predator as he ran across the great room, toward the storage area. His father’s Bushnell eight-by-thirtys—he passed them by. The forty power zoom lens spotting scope he used as a telescope. He grabbed this, stuffing it box and all inside his shirt. Pulling aside what blocked the emergency exit hatch, he worked the combination, opening it, and started up through the tunnel along the rungs his father had put in place five centuries earlier. He kept moving, through the next hatch, not bothering to put the bar in place, merely closing the hermetically sealed door. He kept moving, upward, the exertion making him sweat, the flashlight in his left hand bouncing its beam across the natural rock chimney in the darkness, a white light. The upper door—he wrenched the bar free, swinging the door open, the cold wash of night air chilling him as he crawled out onto the top of the mountain. He let the hatch swing closed behind him.
I Stars—millions, the night cold and crystal clear ■ and the moon little more than a crescent of light. I The box for the spotting scope—he opened it, f not bothering with the supporting bipod.
The forty power scope—he zoomed the lens to half of full magnification, searching the horizon.
A streak of light.
Holding his position, he increased the magnifi-cation—the streak of light gained definition, clarity, color. Orange, tinged with yellow and red. It zigzagged. A meteor, he told himself, would not do that. It vanished toward Earth and in his mind he marked the approximate position. North-west, beyond the mountains, past which he had never ventured, long past these. Michael Rourke’s hands trembled—had they ceased to be alone? He watched the night sky, shivering with the cold. There was no more light, no further clue.
His voice unsteady—he told himself because of the cold, thin night air—Michael Rourke whis-pered, “I’ll find you.”
Chapter Nine
“If it was the Eden Project, it was a crash maybe. And if it wasn’t the Eden Project, then it almost had to be some other type of aircraft. That means people—that other people are alive.” »
Annie licked her lips—she felt strange hearing Michael’s words. She was used to them being alone except for the four sleeping figures in the blue gas swirling cryogenic chambers. She stood up, slipping off the counter stool, stuffing her bare feet into her slippers, her robe and the nightgown beneath it falling past her ankles, the hems brushing the gap of flesh above the banded tops of the slippers. “What do you want to do about it, Michael?” she asked, her voice low, turning to the stove to pour the boiling hot water into the teapot. She grew her own herbs in the garden and made from them an herbal tea which she had become quite fond of. She could smell it as the water penetrated the holes in the small metal tea strainer, and she placed the lid of the china pot in position, twisting it slightly to lock. She would let the tea steep.
“That’s ^yhat I wanted to talk to you about,” she heard Michbel saying. She turned around to face him, holding the teapot with a potholder, setting it on the counter beside their waiting cups— Michael tolerated the tea because coffee was a scarce commodity.
Annie gathered her robe around her and eased back onto the stool. “You want to go and see, don’t you?”
“Yes—I have to.” He reminded her of the memories she had of her father—he looked
virtually identical to John Rourke and he sounded identical to him. Her father
had made instruc-
AfL
tional videotapes for them regarding minor sur-gical procedures, gunsmithing techniques, etc. She played them often so she could remember him. She had no specific memory of her mother, though looking at her in the cryogenic chamber where she slept Annie saw their common physical features. But her mother’s hair was darker, auburn colored. Her own hair was, as her father had always called it, a dark honey blond. Specific memories she didn’t have, but general memories—love, warmth, friendship. To have another woman in whom she could confide—it w
as a dream and soon, when it would be the appointed time for the Awakening, it would be reality. She had read books, seen videotaped movies, where mother and daughter disagreed, where enmity had replaced love, dis-trust replaced respect. It was something she could not comprehend. And yet her mother would be like her sister. Only four years older physically than she when the Awakening would come.
She poured some of her tea, Michael’s cup first. “Where will you go?” “I marked the point on the mountains and when I came back up top I shot an azmuth on it. I can’t really be too precise as to the distance. But the direction, I’ve got that.”
“Will you take one of the motorcycles?”
“I can use Dad’s maps of the strategic fuel reserves—I’ll be all right.” “You can take some of the dehydrated food. I’ll prepare it for you. When are you thinking of—“ “Today—in a few hours. If there was a crash and there’s someone out there, well—maybe I can—“■
“I know—you sound like our father. You look like him. Sometimes I think you think like him.”
He smiled.
“But you don’t smoke cigars. I can help you get your gear ready—what will you need?”
“I’ve got my guns—and I’ll take an M-16—“
“Take one of the Gerber fighting knives.”
“I was planning to.”
“I’ll pack some socks and underwear and things for you.”
“All right.” Michael nodded. “Will you be all right?”
“Alone? But I’m not alone.” Annie smiled. “And you’ve been gone before.”
“This’ll be for a longer time.”
“Give me a time limit—so I know when to start worrying.” Michael Rourke laughed. “All right, if I’m not back in fourteen days, then start worrying.”
“If you’re not back in fourteen days,” and she sipped at her tea—it was very hot, “I’ll do more than worry,” she promised. The Awakening was to be on Christmas Day and that was seventeen days.
