The Survivalist

by Jerry Ahern

  THE SURVIVALIST #03

  The Quest

  by Jerry Ahern

  Chapter 1

  Sarah. Michael. Ann. Alive. God—Rourke thought as he walked briskly through the woods beyond the gutted framework of his house, the note Sarah had written and nailed to the barn door folded tightly in his wallet—but why do I need a wallet? Driver’s license, Social Security card, concealed weapons permit—the latter made Rourke laugh—he wanted to laugh for the first time since the night of the war. Concealed weapons permit, he laughed again. He walked on, the Python strapped to his right hip in the Ranger leather camouflage rig, the twin stainless Detonics in the Alessi shoulder holsters under his leather jacket, the Colt CAR-15 slung under his right arm, muzzle down, his thumb hooked in the carrying handle under the scope.

  It was all useless, he realized, everything in his wallet—or almost everything. The hundred-dollar bill with Ben Franklin looking enigmatic in its center, the CIA card, the credit cards—the only things that were real there anymore was the picture of his wife, Sarah, his son, Michael, and his daughter, Ann—and it wasn’t really such a good pic­ture of them, didn’t do them justice. But the picture and the voided Rourke family check with the note from Sarah scrawled across it were the only real things ever since the war. Looking up at the stars, he revised his thinking: the stars were real, the earth was still real under his feet, but for how long he didn’t know. There had been odd clouds in the night sky, the sunsets had been redder each evening, and the weather seemed definitely to be changing. How many missiles had been launched, bombs dropped that night of World War III, World War Last in all likelihood? And that was another real thing, he thought, puffing on one of the cigars, the stubby, thin tobacco in the left corner of his mouth, almost bolted between his clenched white teeth.

  He stopped walking and looked up to the sky again, wondering what was up there. He’d found himself wondering that progressively more often. When he was training to be a physician, he had been concerned with what had made man work, not the humanity but the physiology of it. Later, in the CIA in Covert Operations, he’d been equally concerned with making men stop working: he hadn’t become a weapons expert by mere chance or through a cor­respondence course. Later as a quote/unquote Sur­vival Expert, Rourke had been concerned again with keeping men working—the body functioning and liv­ing, despite all odds. But he wondered, as he dragged on the cigar, whether or not Sarah and the children were watching the stars this night, if somewhere there were sanity, somewhere beings who had not pressed the magic and deadly red button and ordered the mass midnight executions of legions of total strangers, men and women and children and all their dogs, cats, frogs, and farm animals. Sometimes, Rourke realized, he almost cursed himself for being sane; it would have been easier the other way.

  And there was Paul Rubenstein, the young Jewish guy from New York City, or what had been New York City. He’d never ridden a motor, never fired a gun—let alone in anger—and somehow Rourke counted the younger man his best ally and, next to Sarah and the children, the only friend he had.

  He looked at the dark ground, then studied the cigar butt, the tip glowing orange in his fingers, and looked again, trying to find the nearest star.

  Rourke didn’t like riding the motorcycle in darkness. The Harley Low Rider handled perfectly, everything worked well, but he wouldn’t ride any bike without glasses, and all he had were the sunglasses and light sensitive with well-above-normal night vision. Rourke could see well enough in the dark with his sunglasses on, but felt like a fool wearing them. He glanced at his watch. Once he’d crossed into what had been—before the night of the war—the Eastern Time Zone, he’d set the Rolex Submariner one hour ahead. But he still felt he was on Rourke Standard Time: he had set the watch by the sun, but now he was judging sunrise by the watch and the Rolex’s luminous face read just past six-thirty A.M. He watched the horizon and could see the reddish line there that meant the clouds were still dust-laden. Radioactive dust? He reminded himself to check one of the two Geiger counters, the one he carried on his bike. He’d left the other one with Paul Rubenstein.

  Rourke stopped the bike. He was less than five miles from where he’d left Paul, secure up in the rocks, the wounds still painful but on the mend, the “Schmeisser” subgun as the younger man still in­sisted on calling the MP-40, the Browning High Power, and Rourke’s own Steyr-Mannlicher SSG Special Rifle as companions. Rourke watched the horizon line—the hell with the watch he thought—and saw the sun wink up above the glow­ing red clouds. The redness of the clouds worried him; he made another mental note to check the radiation count. Suddenly, there was a knot in the pit of his stomach: what would life be like after his quest was through, after he found Sarah, Michael, and Ann? Would they all live in the retreat forever—like early man, but instead in a sophisticated cave with all the conveniences? And afterward, after that, what kind of world—what world at all perhaps—would the children grow up into?

  Rourke could see himself, someday saying to his son, “Michael, I leave you vast nuclear wastelands, in which nothing will grow for two centuries, irradiated water you cannot drink, poisoned air you cannot breath, the last surviving Encyclopedia because there is no one left to write another and a superlative command of the language—but no one to talk to. Here’s a vintage motorcycle, but there is no gasoline; Here’s your choice of the finest pistols ever made, but all the ammunition is gone now. And the birds and the bees I told you about are now totally extinct, and if you do find a human female who hasn’t grown up to be a murderess or just gone in­sane, you can have children with her to perpetuate the race, but it’s likely they’ll be hideously de­formed.” Rourke shook his head and watched the sunrise. He never knew when it would be the last time anymore. The sun rose because the earth rotated, but when would that stop? He thought of the finishing line for the lecture to his son on the at­taining of his manhood: “Have a good time ...” Rourke stopped the bike again, the grayness in the East pink-tinged with the color of the horizon, the fog smelling foul and rolling in waves across the ground. He heard shots just ahead, killed the motor on the Harley and swung the CAR-15 from the muzzle down carry across his back into his right hand, the fingers of his fist wrapped around the pistol grip, his left hand automatically coming back and sweeping the bolt open and letting it fly for­ward, his thumb fingering the semi-automatic’s selector into the safe position. The ground dropped off perhaps fifty yards ahead of him. Beyond that was a long grade, then a clearing of flatland, then a high mound of rocks. Rourke edged forward from the Harley, the gunfire growing clearer with each step, sporadic, not like a pitched battle, but rather like ... He stopped and flattened himself on the lip of the grade. Paul Rubenstein was in the high rocks beyond the clearing where Rourke had left him early that previous night. Below Paul were perhaps a dozen figures, most of them men, but one or two possibly women—(it was hard to tell sometimes, Rourke reflected). The figures—clearly brigands, heavily armed, dirty-looking, and out for blood—were slowly advancing up the rocks, firing to keep Rubenstein pinned down until they could close in. Rourke’s face creased into a smile. “Here it goes again,” he whispered.

  Chapter 2

  Rourke moved the Harley back into a stand of trees, then circled wide around the lip of the grade, noticing five pick up trucks of varying vintage parked perhaps two hundred yards farther back in a small clearing—the brigands’ transportation, he decided. Rourke had already assessed the situation. If he started shooting, there would be a protracted gun battle, lasting hours, perhaps it could last days, especially if there were more of the brigands nearby to hear the change in the pattern of the shots and come running to reinforce their friends.

  Rourke was now at the far end of the grade, look­ing down onto
the flat expanse leading toward the high rocks. He could see Paul Rubenstein, body tucked down, the Steyr-Mannlicher SSG Special Rifle with the 3 x 9 scope at his shoulder. There would be a series of shots from the brigands to pin Paul down, then the brigands would advance, and Paul would edge up and fire the green synthetic stocked rifle, then duck down as the brigands shot again. If the brigands had divided themselves into fire-and-maneuver elements, Rourke realized, they could have swept over Paul easily, but fortunately their tactics weren’t that good.

  Rourke slung the CAR-15 across his back diagonally, muzzle down, and edged over the lip of the grade, hugging the pine trees and low rocks along the side and moving diagonally along the left flank of the attacking brigands. The closest of them—a big man, heavyset, armed with some type of automatic rifle Rourke couldn’t immediately iden­tify at the distance—was perhaps fifty yards away, edging along a wall of low rocks running in a zigzag pattern toward the far side of Rubenstein’s position. Rourke inched along, flanking the man, but cutting the distance too, timing spurts of his own movements to the covering noise of the brigands’ shots. With his left hand, Rourke palmed out the A.G. Russell black chrome Sting IA; the tiny double-edged knife shifted then into his right hand. There was another long round of firing and Rourke made his move, coming up behind the heavy brigand in a rush, diving toward him, tackling the man and bringing him down hard onto the rocks, the squishing sound of the man’s head slamming into a rock, Rourke’s right fist ramming forward into the throat rather than the man’s trunk because of the shortness of the knife blade. Rourke gave the knife a hard twist and ripped it out, flattening himself over the body, listening for a change in the pattern of shooting. Looking up over the low wall of rocks, he saw that nothing had changed. He picked his next target—a tall, lanky man with shoulder-length blond hair and a scraggly beard. Wiping the knife blade clean of blood on the first dead man’s trousers, Rourke inched forward over the low rock wall and toward the tall blond man.

  The target was twenty-five yards ahead, and as with the first brigand, Rourke waited for another long shot string, then made a headlong dash, leaping over a clump of low rocks, sidestepping a half-rotted pine tree trunk and diving into the man’s body just below the waist, throttling him to the ground. Rourke’s right hand whipped forward with the knife, his left hand grabbed on to a handful of the greasy hair and jerked the head back to expose the neck, then the knife made a left to right swipe across the unguarded throat. As Rourke drew the knife away, he let the head sag to the rocks. Wiping the blade clean on the blond man’s clothes, Rourke spotted his next target, wondering how many of them he could take out before they’d be missed, before someone would turn around, see him, then start the real shooting.

  He edged toward a black man, smallish in build, but the bare arms rippling with muscles. A .45 automatic was in the man’s left hand. The distance was twenty-five, perhaps thirty yards, the precise range hard to tell because of the man’s position in the rocks. Rourke closed to ten yards, waited for another volley of shots from the brigands, then moved forward. He dove toward the man, but the man turned, sidestepping and missing Rourke’s knife blade, but Rourke’s left arm was solidly hooked on the man’s left shoulder and neck and he brought him down. As the man started to shout, Rourke lunged upward from his knees with the Sting IA, the spear point biting deep into the Adam’s apple. The man fell back, his mouth half opened, but the scream not coming. The body tumbled backward along the rocks.

  Rourke got to his knees, turning, and saw one of the brigands looking his way, starting to shout. Rourke’s right hand dropped the knife, flashing toward the Detonics pistol under his left armpit, the tiny stainless steel .45 in his fist, the hammer swiping back to full stand. The first finger of Rourke’s right hand edged against the trigger until it gave, the pistol rocking in his hand, the brigand sounding the alarm now falling back, the center of his forehead split wide because of the angle of the 185-grain jacketed hollow point slug when it impacted.

  Rourke snatched up his knife, wiped it clean, and holstered it, then pulled the second Detonics from under his right arm.

  With one of the .45s in each fist, Rourke started up the sloping rocks, the brigands turning toward him now, directing their fire away from Rubenstein. Rourke fired the gun in the left hand, then the one in the right, then the left again. As the enemy fire started finding him, he dove into the rocks, hearing the chattering of Rubenstein’s 9mm subgun coming from the top of the rocks. Jamming both of the emptied .45s into his belt, Rourke swung the CAR-15 from his back, his thumb flicking off the safety, his trigger finger snapping off three-round, semi-automatic bursts from the Colt’s thirty-round magazine. The brigands were falling back. Rourke got to his feet and moved out toward them. From the corner of his left eye he saw Rubenstein, moving awkwardly because of the earlier wounds, starting down from the rocks, the subgun in his right hand, the 9mm Browning High Power in his left, both guns spitting fire. Three brigands were still moving along down toward the base of the rocks and past the clearing, heading for the trees. “The pickups,” Rourke rasped under his breath. He raised the CAR-15 and fired, then fired again, but the magazine was shot empty and there were still two men running.

  Rourke let the CAR-15 swing out of the way under his arm. He snatched the Mag-Na-Ported six-inch Python from his hip, lining the dull metallic finish of the Metalifed gun’s front sight into the outlined notch of the Omega rear sight blade, his fists wrapped around the massive Pachmayr grips, the double action pull coming off, a single 158-grain semi-jacketed soft point belching fire at the muzzle. The nearer of the two men was going down and roll­ing forward, hands outstretched.

  Rourke sighted again, fired and missed, then thumb cocked the Python—the last brigand was perhaps seventy-five yards downrange, and Rourke fired, the muzzle climb of the .357 almost negligible, but blocking his view for an instant. As the gun came down out of recoil, he saw the last brigand staggering, both hands clamped to the small of his back, then the legs buckled and the man went down. Rourke turned, swinging the muzzle of the Python around, but eased it down.

  Paul Rubenstein was beside him. The younger man, his face streaming sweat, panted, “You shot him in the back.” Rourke let the revolver hang limp at his right side along his thigh and said, “Only because that was the guy’s best looking side.”

  Chapter 3

  Sarah Rourke dismounted, held loosely one of Tildie’s reins as she stood beside the lathered animal, and stared out at the sandbag fence and the farm­house beyond.

  She looked over her shoulder, “Michael, Annie—you, too, Millie—stay here and keep mounted. I’m going to see if there’s anyone at that farmhouse.” Then looking at ten-year-old Millie Jenkins, she added, “Millie, I want to see if anyone knows your aunt and where I can find her farm.”

  Sarah turned back and faced the farmhouse, then drying her sweating palms on the sides of her blue-jeaned thighs, she started walking toward the sand­bag fence, leading Tildie behind her. The mare whinnied once, snorted, and followed her on the loose rein. Sarah had left tied to Tildie’s saddle the modified AR-15 she’d taken from one of the brigands that first morning after the war. All she had was her husband’s Colt .45 automatic inside the waistband of her trousers, the butt concealed under her ripped blue T-shirt. She was perspiring despite the fact that it was cool in the Tennessee Mountains. She stripped the blue-and-white bandanna from her hair and shook her dark hair loose as the wind whipped up from beyond the farmhouse.

  She had seen no sign of life at the house but it looked normal enough and that was why she had determined to stop. She’d been searching the Smoky Mountains around Mt. Eagle for several days now, trying to find “Aunt Mary” and deliver Millie Jenkins. Aunt Mary was Millie’s mother’s sister, so the last name would be different and Sarah had no idea what Carla Jenkins’s maiden name had been. It was likely, too, Aunt Mary was herself married. All Millie remembered of her aunt’s farm was that the house had been set in a valley with a huge ho
rse pasture fenced in behind it and that Aunt Mary grew roses.

  As Sarah approached the sandbag fence and stopped, leaning her left hand against one of the sandbags, she stared up at the house, seeing it now in greater detail. There were five pickup trucks parked in the yard, all lined up in some kind of order. The windows of the house were shuttered closed, with narrow slits in them. A chill ran up her spine, but not from the wind, she thought. She reached under her T-shirt and took out her husband’s .45. She’d taught herself how to lower the hammer on a loaded chamber and now, with the hammer down, she braced her thumb against it and cocked it, raising the safety, then slid the gun back under her T-shirt, having kept the gun below the level of the sandbags in case anyone in the house was watching her. The slide of the pistol felt almost slimy with her own perspiration.

  She climbed up on the bottom stack of sandbags to get a better view of the farmhouse, then raised her right arm, sweeping it back and forth, calling out at the top of her lungs, “Hello! Is anybody there? I want to talk!”

  She stopped and listened. There was no reply. She waved the blue-and-white bandanna in her hand and shouted at the top of her voice across the sandbag fence, “Hello! I just want to talk!”

  The door of the farmhouse opened. A tall, black-bearded man stepped out onto the unpainted porch, some kind of rifle or shotgun in his hands—Sarah couldn’t tell which from the distance. As he walked toward the steps leading up onto the porch, Sarah stopped waving the bandanna.

  The man shouted—she could hear him well—“We don’t want no strangers ‘round heah, lady. Git out a’ heah!”

  Sarah Rourke shook her head angrily, too angry to say anything. Then, forcing herself under control, she said, “Look, I’ve got three small children with me. I don’t want anything from you—just direc­tions. Please!”