by Jerry Ahern
She twisted the bandanna in her hands, then stared down into the valley. As the sunlight ebbed, she could see the fires at both ends of the town much more clearly.
Chapter Seven
All Ron Jenkins had said to her and to his wife, Carla, was, "I'm goin' on down into that town there. I won't need my horse—you keep it close by and saddled and ready. I figure they might have some water and some other things down there I reckon we could use just as soon as letting them down there to rot."
Carla Jenkins had thrown her arms around her husband and tried to stop him, but one thing Sarah Rourke had learned about Ron Jenkins was that once he made up his mind he wouldn't change it. She remembered her own husband being like that, but now, since the night of the war and her experiences that following morning, she felt that perhaps she should have changed hers. She had hated the guns he kept, practically called him a fool for building and stocking his survival retreat. Yet, guns had kept her alive so far, and now the survival retreat she had loathed the thought of seemed to her a sort of haven of normalcy as she sat there in the dark, huddled with the children, their heads on her lap.
There could be no fire, the brigands having left the town only a few hours earlier and still perhaps close enough to see a fire and come and investigate. She couldn't sleep, though she was tired. Her body was beyond sleep, she thought. She watched Carla Jenkins. Carla—who talked too much usually—was silent as a grave, her daughter Millie's head cradled on her lap. Carla—less than a yard away from Sarah—just sat staring out into the darkness.
The sound came again, and the shiver up Sarah Rourke's spine came again as well. It was a scream, from the town below them in the darkness of the valley. A scream, but an unnatural-sounding one. She knew the sound, having worked as a volunteer in a hospital where she'd first met John Rourke. It was a man screaming. She had heard the sound in the hospital emergency room too often. She had met John, thought little beyond the fact that his lean face and high forehead and dark eyes and hair looked attractive and that he had apparently noticed her too. Years later, when their lives had crossed again, they had dated, talked a lot and married eventually. It had taken both of them some time to recall the chance meeting years earlier. They had laughed about it.
But now, as the scream came for a third time, the memory of each moment shared with her husband was like a cocoon to which she could withdraw, even if just for an instant.
Finally, when the scream came a fourth time, she eased the children's heads from her lap, pushed the hair from Michael's eyes and moved nearer to Carla Jenkins. "I think one of us should go and see, Carla."
Sarah whispered, afraid that even the slightest noise might attract the brigands.
"I can't," Carla answered, her voice barely audible.
"I can go," Sarah said, bolstering her courage and simultaneously cursing herself for having said it.
"No—you mustn't. Ron will be back soon."
"But someone is screaming down there, Carla. It might be that something has happened—"
"No—he is just fine. Now you let things be."
Sarah Rourke sat back on her haunches, staring at Carla Jenkins, seeing the face, watching the lips move even in the darkness between them—but hearing herself. She couldn't say to Carla Jenkins, "You're being a fool—your husband is in trouble down there. The brigands must have come back— they're killing him." She couldn't say that without admitting to herself that perhaps the thought of John Rourke coming for her and Michael and Annie was just a fantasy.
"I'm going," she said finally.
"I don't want you to."
"Watch Michael and Annie, Carla—I have to—" but Sarah Rourke didn't finish the sentence. The scream came for a fifth time, only weaker but longer in duration now. She stood up, checked the .45 Colt Government Model in her waistband and went back to Michael and Ann. She nudged Michael. "Michael— I need you to wake up."
"No—I wasn't asleep. Just a—"
"Now Michael—you're like your father! The slightest noise in the middle of the night and you're wide awake. Try to wake you up in the morning and it's like World War—" She stopped, her mouth still open. My God, she thought! How we used to joke about it. She tried waking Michael again and this time he sat up.
"Now, are you awake?"
"Yes," he said, his voice not sounding that way to her.
"All right—I'm going down into the valley to see if Mr. Jenkins is all right. I don't want to wake up Annie, but if she does wake up keep her very still. If she makes noise those bad men who burned the town there could find us. Do you understand, Michael?"
"Yes, I understand. But why do you have to go, Mom?"
"Somebody has to go—Mr. Jenkins might be in trouble down there."
"Do you have your gun—so you can shoot them if you have to?"
She looked at her son, running her fingers in his hair. His hair, his face, even the dark eyes that because of the night she couldn't quite see were exactly like her husband's. She was coming to understand that so was his logic. "Yes, I'll take my gun. Just listen to Mrs. Jenkins and do what she says unless—" and Sarah Rourke looked over her shoulder, watched Carla Jenkins staring into the darkness, rock rigid. "Unless what she says doesn't sound right—do you understand what I mean?"
He screwed up his face, looked away a moment, then said, "I think I do—if she tells me to do something dumb, I shouldn't do it?"
"Right—but think—just think and otherwise do what she says."
He leaned up and put his arms around her neck and she kissed him, barely touching her left hand to her daughter's head in fear of waking her. "Take care of Annie—remember you're the man," she said.
Sarah Rourke reached down and took the AR-15, checked the safety and pulled the bandanna down a little over her ears. She blew Michael a kiss and started away from the campsite. She half thought of taking her horse as a quick means of escape, but the noise the animal would make might give her away, she reasoned. The legs of her jeans—bell bottoms— caught continuously on the brush as she moved as silently as she could into the woods on the slope and down into the valley. She stopped after a few hundred yards and rolled up the cuffs of her pants. She heard another scream; by now she had lost count. She remembered reading a western novel her husband had bought once. In it, the Indians had taken the scout captive and were torturing him throughout the night and into the early morning, just to unnerve the settlers hiding in the circled wagon train. They had tied the man to a wagon wheel and roasted him over a fire. The thought of it still caused her to shudder.
She stopped in her tracks, then dropped to the ground, hugging the AR-15 to her chest. She was less than a hundred yards from the main street of the town now and could see the center of the street clearly. She could see a half-dozen or so of the brigands—and at their center she could see Ron Jenkins. At least she supposed it was Ron Jenkins. She heard the scream again and almost screamed herself.
One of the men—a tall black man with no sleeves on his coat—had a jumper cable in his gloved right hand, the cable leading to a storage battery on the ground a few inches from Ron Jenkins' feet. When he touched the end of the cable to Jenkins' body, Jenkins twisted against the ropes binding him to the front bumper of the pickup truck, shuddered, then screamed again.
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—"
Chapter Ten
Rourke worked the CAR-15's trigger steadily, aiming rather than at single targets at groups of targets, figuring to up his chances of making each shot count. As best he could make out as he sped along the gauntlet of armed men on each side of him, the ones by the bridge—there was a large hole in the middle of it—were Mexican, firing at Texans on the street side and also caught in a crossfire between t
he Texans and some other group at the far end of the bridge on the Juarez side. A man from the Mexican group started running into the street toward Rourke, what Rourke identified as a vintage Thompson SMG in his hands, spitting fire. Rourke swerved his bike, a burst of the heavy .45 ACP slugs from the tommy gun chewing into the pavement beside him. Fighting to control the bike and still keep shooting, Rourke swerved back right, his bike now less than a dozen feet from the man with the Thompson.
As the man turned to fire another burst, Rourke pumped two rounds from the semiautomatic Colt CAR-15 that he held like a pistol in his fist. Both Rourke's shots slammed hard into the tommy-gun-armed man's chest, hammering him back onto the pavement. Rourke's bike skidded as the subgunner fell uncharacteristically forward, the body vaulting toward the front wheel of Rourke's bike. The bike slipped and Rourke rolled away. Flat on the street, Rourke hauled himself up to his knees and holding the CAR-15 at waist level, fired rapid, two-round semiautomatic bursts into the closest of the armed men. At the corner of his eye, Rourke could see Rubenstein, hear him shouting, "I'm coming, John!"
Rourke hauled himself to his feet. Firing the CAR-15 one-handed again like a long-barreled pistol, Rourke ran toward his bike. Two men with riot shotguns were opening up on him, running for him, Rourke guessed in order to steal the bike and his weapons. Dropping to one knee, he swapped the CAR-15 into his left hand, firing it empty at the two attackers, and snatching the Python from the leather on his right hip, he fired it as well.
Backstepping, holstering the Python and making a rapid magazine change on the CAR-15, Rourke hauled his bike up, kicked it started and let the CAR-15 hang at his side on its black web sling as he started the bike back into the middle of the street.
Already, more than a half-dozen men from the building side of the street were running toward him, assault rifles and pistols blazing in their hands. Swerving to avoid the fusillade of gunfire, Rourke cut back along the street, catching sight of Rubenstein coming up fast behind him. Rourke gunned his bike and jumped the curb, heading down along the sidewalk, the Mexicans there on the bridge side parting in waves before him as he bent low over his bike, firing the CAR-15. Behind him, Rourke could hear the steady, light three-round bursts of Rubenstein's German MP-40 9mm, hear Rubenstein's counterfeit Rebel yell—"Ya-hoo!"
