by Jerry Ahern
She stood outside the Retreat, the motorcycle— one of the big Harley-Davidson Lowx Riders, blue—between them. It was cold and she hunched her shoulders under the quilted midcalf-length coat she had made for herself two years earlier, the wind blowing up the road leading away from the Retreat, whipping under her nearly ankle-length skirt, making her bare legs cold where her stockings stopped just below the knee. A shawl— she had crocheted it herself—was wrapped around her head and neck, her hands stuffed in the pockets of her coat. She watched Michael as he finished securing the last of his gear aboard the bike. She had helped him check it, had prepared a spare parts kit for him just in case.
“Well.” Michael smiled. “I guess this is it.”
She looked at her brother a moment. He wore one of her father’s spare leather jackets. Slung across his back was the Magnum Sales Stalker, scope covers in place. In a crossdraw holster by his left hip bone was the smaller, scopeless, .44 Magnum Predator. She had helped him to secure the M-16 to the bike. On his right hip was the Gerber Mkll fighting knife. She had given him another knife from her father’s stock—an A.G. Russell Sting IA, but not black chromed like the one that helped to form her father’s battery of personal weapons. This was natural stainless steel finish. “I wish you’d take a double action revolver or a semi-automatic pistol.”
“I’m happy with these. I know how to use them—even Dad told me I was a good shot with them.”
“But Daddy never liked you just carrying single actions—too slow to reload.”
“I’ll be all right, Annie—now don’t worry.” He smiled. She walked around behind the back of the bike, inspecting it once more with her eyes. She put her arms around his neck, felt his arms encircle her body, pulling her close. She wondered what the embrace of a lover would be like. At nearly twenty-eight, she had never known that. She felt Michael’s lips brush her cheek. She took his face in her hands, her hands cold in the wind, and kissed him full on the lips, fast. “I love you, Michael—you’re the only brother I’ve got. Be careful.”
Michael Rourke laughed. ifThat the only reason you love me—because I’m the only brother you’ve got?”
She laughed, burying her head against his chest—the shawl worked down from her head as he stepped away to mount the bike, the wind caught her hair. She raised her arms to capture her hair with her hands, holding it back with her left hand. Michael mounted the Harley and gunned the engine to life.
He looked at her once, smiling. “Be seein’ ya, Annie,” and then he turned away. She stood there, the bike starting down the road away from the Retreat, watching him. He looked back once and she waved at him. She kept watching, wrapping the shawl around her head again, stabbing her hands into her pockets, shivering in the wind, but watching him until she could no longer see even a speck of movement that might still be him. ‘t Alone, Annie Rourke turned around and started back into the Retreat, opening the interior door after closing the exterior door, killing the red light and then closing the Retreat door behind her.
In the winter, there was little to do. No garden. She neatly folded her shawl and set it on the edge of the kitchen counter to be put away later. She took off her coat, setting it across the top of one of the stools—the one Michael usually used.
Standing in the cold had made her want to go to the bathroom, and she started across the Great Room. But she stopped, staring at one of the cryogenic chambers. Not her father, or her mother, or the Russian woman Natalia—Natalia was very beautiful. As she—Annie—stabbed her hands into the pockets of her skirt, she stared at another face. Paul Rubenstein. He was not handsome, but she liked the set of his face. She remembered him almost not at all, except that they had all played cards together and Faul Rubenstein had told her she was a very pretty girl and she had giggled.
She smiled thinking of it.
Later she would check the small paper-making operation. Later she would fix a little dinner for herself. Later—later she would go to the bath-room. She stood watching Paul Rubenstein instead.
She was her father’s daughter, she had always known, and before Michael had even begun to realize it, she had realized it.
John Rourke had played God.
John Rourke had let her age to nearly the age of Paul Rubenstein. He had picked Paul as her mate, or husband, but who would marry them? Her father? Was being master of the Retreat like being master of a ship? Or perhaps if the Eden Project did return, the commander of the Shuttle Fleet could perform some sort of ceremony.
She had accepted her father’s decision, not because it was his decision, but because for some reason she could not understand, she had found herself staring at Paul Rubenstein a great deal, fantasizing what his voice would sound like, wondering if the cryogenic sleep would somehow alleviate the eyesight problem which caused him to wear the wire-rimmed glasses which were with his things in the storeroom. She had^washed the glasses once, buffed the lenses. She had wanted to do it.
She looked away from Paul Rubenstein, smil-ing, laughing a little as she whispered, “My intended.” Annie looked at the face of Natalia Tiemerovna. She—Natalia—was her brother’s
“intended,” and Annie knew that. She had considered that a great deal. Michael had talked about their father and “the Russian woman” many times. Annie had decided that her father had been in love with two women—their mother and “the Russian woman.” But something inside of her, and something too in the face of the sleeping “Russian woman” made her feel inside of her that playing at being God wouldn’t prove quite as easy as her father might have thought. She no longer had to urinate. Instead, she started back toward the kitchen—she wondered if Paul Rubenstein would like her cooking. She stopped beside the counter, unbuckling the web belt with the military flap holster from around her waist, the Detonics Scoremaster always carried there when she left the Retreat whatever the reason. She set the gunbelt down beside her shawl, picked up her apron and began tying it about her waist. She could fix something exotic—Michael liked only bland things. A spinach souffle—she could start with that.
Chapter Ten
He had traveled for five days and in two more would turn back, he had promised himself. He would not abandon the search, but rather return to be with Annie for the Awakening. Then perhaps he and his father both could search, Paul Ruben-stein staying behind with the women to protect the Retreat. He had often fantasized what it would be like to rove the new earth with his father, to search out its secrets.
There was his mother to consider, and the Russian woman as well—but he knew his father well. There was something inside his father—and it burned inside him as well.
There was a world to tame, to explore.
Michael Rourke dismounted the Harley Low Rider, letting down the stand, the bike freshly filled some twenty miles back at one of the strategic fuel sites from his father’s map. From the cold temperatures and the spectacular height of the mountains and the distance he had traveled, he judged himself somewhere in Tennessee between what had been Chattanooga and what had been Nashville. There was a high rise of rocky ground with some scrub brush clinging to it for a distance, the rise too steep to navigate with the Harley but not too steep by foot. t He took the key for the Harley, perfunctorily taking the M-16, slinging it across his back, letting the Stalker swing on its sling across his chest as he started up the rocky face. He climbed for a dual purpose—for sign of what he had seen fall from the sky to the northwest and to see if any of the terrain stirred memories in him, memories of the times he and his mother and his sister had moved about these mountains following the Night of The War, searching for his father.
The rocks were a steeper climb than he had anticipated, but he worked cautiously and slowly
—a broken ankle or broken leg could have spelled his doom here and he was aware of the hazards of traveling alone in the wilderness. Michael Rourke kept climbing.
When he reached the top, he sagged over the edge, catching his breath. He wondered what it would be like to function in a
full atmosphere again where the air was not so thin and cold in his lungs.
He edged completely over the lip of rock, standing up. Had it been summer, he would have worn a hat to guard against the stronger sunlight. He ran his hands through his hair instead, reminding himself he would need Annie to give him a haircut when he returned to the Retreat. The wind caught at his hair again and he pushed a thick strand of it—dark brown like his father’s, he thought—back from his eyes.
Michael Rourke looked behind him—nothing but landscape, however more beautiful it seemed almost day by day to become. He walked across the flat expanse of rock, taking the Bushnell eight-by-thirtys from their case at his left side—they were his father’s.
Before him, as he stopped at the edge of the rock, he thought he might well be able to see as far as the next state.
He focused the rubber-armored binoculars, scanning toward the horizon. Trees were growing in more abundance than he had seen near the Retreat—perhaps being farther north had some-thing to do with it, he surmised—the rays of sunlight less direct, the sunlight level more benign. Michael had placed the binocular strap around his neck, and now he let it fall to his chest.
He took the G.I. Lensatic compass from his leather jacket’s left outside patch
pocket, opened the case and raised the lens, sighting due north-west. He had no
way of knowing if the poles might perhaps have shifted somehow during the
cata-clysm, the holocaust. But even if they had, he used the compass only for
land navigation and it would
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be consistent for that, if off slightly from true north. The North Star—it seemed where it should be to him when he would scan the nighttime skies. He picked a mountain top that was due northwest of him, closing the compass, pocketing it.
Michael Rourke raised the binoculars, aiming the twin tubes toward the northwest.
A chill passed along his spine, consuming him with cold. There had been no lightning storms. But there was a thin plume of grey-black smoke rising. Fire.
“People.” He said the word very softly.
Chapter Eleven
He had followed his compass—and by the odometer on the Harley, he had traveled twenty-four miles. For the last two miles, when the rolling of the terrain had permitted, he had seen the plume of smoke, its detail rich, the colors in it varied. He had driven the Harley ever closer to it, his hands sweating inside his gloves.
He had stopped the Harley, taking it off the gravel and dirt track he had followed for the last mile, pulling it into the trees, camouflaging it with pine boughs, taking his pack onto his back, moving ahead on foot. In the clear air, sound traveled long distances. If there were people, he had no desire for a machine from the twentieth century to frighten them. They might well be very simple.
Michael Rourke checked his map, having updated it as best he could as he had traveled, marking on it in faint pencil the coordinates where he had left the bike. He walked on, the Harley’s key in his jeans pocket, a duplicate key at the Retreat, the pace he set one that was practiced from walking the mountains near the Retreat, one he could maintain in the thinner air. His right fist was closed on the Pachmayr-gripped butt of the Stalker… Michael Rourke walked into the wooded area which for the last mile had been ahead of him, threading his way through the trees, weaving back and forth, moving as soundlessly as possible.
He could smell the smoke now,
And he smelled something else. He didn’t know what it was, but it reminded him of the last time his sister had cooked meat. But the smell was not pleasant and warming to him, but somehow vile.
He was afraid.
He kept going.
Michael’s fist tightened on the butt of the Stalker, tighter than it had been, the Stalker unslung from his side, held slightly ahead of him but not too far—his father had taught him that a gun extended too far ahead of you was an invitation for someone to try to strike it from your hand. Someone. That there might be someone, besides himself, his sister, their parents, Paul Rubenstein and Natalia Tiemerovna—his stom-ach churned, his palms sweated and a chill again traveled the length of his spine. v Michael Rourke parted the low pine boughs, their heaviness at this altitude both startling to him and wonderful. He moved in a crouch, the Stalker in his right fist.
The smell.
He stood stock still as he reached the edge of the trees and could see clearly the open area beyond, the clearing. The fire still smoked, in the center of the clearing, blackened and smoldering. The smell was stronger as he moved into the clearing, his eyes riveted to what he saw beside the fire—it was a human femur. White, the flesh gone, the two ends of the bone jaggedly broken. Michael approached the bone, seeing more bones littering the ground near the fire. He dropped into a crouch—with the spearpoint tip of the big Gerber he carried, he rolled the bone over. The marrow from inside it had been scraped out.
He wiped the knife clean across the clump of grass nearest him, sheathing it.
In the grass, partially charred, lay a fork-sized chunk of meat. Michael took one of the sticks from the fire—it had evidently been used as a cooking spit, the edges notched. There were two forked sticks on each side of the fire. One end of the stick was sharpened to a point, as if it had been used to thrust through something.
With this sharp pointed end, Michael speared the tiny piece of meat. He raised it to his nose. The smell was sweet, sickeningly. It smelled like undercooked pork— what little pork had been in the freezer, he and Annie had long ago decided would be cooked and eaten. Rubenstein was, after all, Jewish, as was Natalia partially. Annie had had him helping her while she had cooked the pork, helping her with preserving vegetables grown in the garden. He remembered the smell.
But it was not pork. The bone, like the other bones Uttered near the fire—it was unmistakably human.
And so was the partially eaten, burned flesh.
He fought the feeling of nausea, standing up, turning away from the fire, trying to breathe through his mouth so he wouldn’t experience the smell. Human beings.
Swallowing hard, his stomach churning, he moved about the clearing. Human feces at the edge of the clearing—the smell still strong. He could have touched them to determine more precisely the age. But warm or not, he would not touch them. A bush, wet, the smell on the leaves that of urine. He scanned each oi the bones as he moved about the place—the encampment. Michael stopped beside a clump of thorny blackberry bushes. It was what he had searched for.
There were no insects since the Night of The
War, or at least none he had detected. So nothing crawled over it. He could have picked it up, if he could have reached through the thorny blackberry bush to take it.
But there was no need to take it.
The skin was gone from the top of the thing, as if scalped. Only the facial skin from halfway down the forehead to below the chin remained, the ears gone as well. The eyes were missing, Eaten, he surmised. The face had been that of a girl younger by some years than his sister. Now, Michael turned away and threw up, dropping to his knees, lurching forward with his heaving abdomen.
There were people—but they were not people like himself.
They were cannibals.
He had cried as a little boy, but never as a man. Until now.
Chapter Twelve
It was true that the cryogenic process served to regenerate the body. But not completely. Only one kidney func-tioned. He no longer had a spleen. A section of his left lung had been cut away. There was a bypass around an irretrievably damaged portion of the large intestine. But aside from urinating a bit more frequently, and in the thin air tiring a bit more quickly than he would have, he suffered no sustaining ill effects. He stood, leaning against the fir tree, watching the snow-capped mountain peaks in the distance.
Greater distances away, beyond these moun-tains and the next and beyond what had been and was still an
ocean, lay his desire.
He was confident that destiny had not cheated him. He had chosen the higher elevations where the air was thinnest for this period of four years since his awakening, chosen it so that he could adapt to thinner air and his decreased lung capacity, so that at normal elevations he would be at full physical strength.
His right hand in his right pocket, he felt at the hardness of his genitalia. He had thought of the woman.
It was time for that.
He turned and walked back from the precipice, along the rugged ground beneath the snow-laden fir trees, toward the mouth of the cave where he and the others had set their encampment three years earlier. He stroked his beard. He passed through the mouth of the cave and beyond./It was warmer from the solar-battery-generated electric heating coils and he opened his coat, not feeling any shortness of breath as he sometimes did when coming into warmth. His people were about their business and he was all but alone at the encampment. All but alone. He opened the wooden door of his hut, stepping inside, throwing down his coat, stripping away the shoulder holster and letting it hang from the straight back of the rough-hewn chair beside the table he used as his desk. He allowed the semi-automatic pistol to stay in its holster. He wouldn’t need it, though he practiced with it three times a week at least. He practiced drawing it quickly from the leather and hitting the torso of a silhouette-shaped target.
He walked from the small room of the hut into the larger room, the only other room. To the left, the shower and toilet behind a curtained doorway built off the room. To the right, the cabinet where he stored the bulk of his possessions. Ahead of him, the bed.
The girl waited there.
“Do you know what I intend to do?”
She had frightened eyes. She was one of the ones who had survived by some means or another and become more animal than human. But she, the animal, was frightened of him, the man.
She had no language other than grunts and he did not know how to converse with her.
