The End is Coming

by Jerry Ahern

  THE SURVIVALIST #08

  The End is Coming

  by Jerry Ahern

  Chapter One

  Rourke eased the dead Mulliner boy’s head to the rocks. Rourke stood up, tired suddenly, more tired than he had been for so long he couldn’t re­member.

  He walked the few paces to the stream at the base of the falls, the roar there loud, steady, throbbing, pulsing in his ears. Spray pelted at his face as he dropped to his knees beside the water, dipping his right hand down, moving his fingers slowly in the cold, roaring waters, the blood drift­ing from them—Bill Mulliner’s blood—forming clouds in the water, red.

  He heard movement behind him. He knew the source. Rourke closed his eyes, felt the hands—soft, cool—touch at his neck, move across his face.

  “You have found them, John—”

  “Probably,” Rourke answered, his voice soft, a whisper.

  “I’ll take Paul to the Retreat—he can help me to unload the cargo from the aircraft and we can get it to the Retreat—I’ll stay with him until you come back.”

  Rourke opened his eyes, hearing the water rush­ing, watching it move, turning his head, still on his knees, looking up at her. “And?”

  “My uncle—I’ll go back—to Chicago—to the KGB—to—”

  Rourke stood up, the falls roaring now, as loudly as his blood in the veins at his temples roared, his heart fast. “No,” he rasped, drawing her into his arms.

  Natalia’s hands—he felt them move across his face, into his hair, his arms bound tightly around her waist and shoulders. He looked at her, at her eyes, their blueness, the whiteness of her skin—her mouth, the lips moist, slightly parting as she leaned her face toward his.

  Rourke bent his face, his lips touching lightly at hers, then crushing down against her mouth, her body pressed tight against him.

  Her hands—he could feel them move, he could feel her breath on his skin, her body rising and falling against his, the pressure of her breasts against his chest.

  Then her face was beside his, half against his left shoulder.

  He heard himself telling her, “I love you—you won’t leave—you won’t go back—”

  “Sarah,” she whispered.

  “I— I— I can’t—I love her, too—I—”

  “I’ll leave—”

  Rourke took Natalia’s arms roughly in bunched fists, holding her away from him at arms’ length, her face downturned, her hair falling forward, her body limp-seeming. “You won’t leave me—I won’t—I won’t let—”

  She looked up at him, her eyes open, wet at the rims, making their blueness that much more bright. Her left hand reached out to him, halting, awkward because of the way he held her upper arms below the shoulders. The fingers of her hand, splayed, now closed, soft as they touched against his lips. “I’ll stay with you forever if you want me—”

  Rourke drew her against him. “Yes,” he whis­pered, not knowing what else to say. He laughed, and she looked up at his face.

  “John?”

  “I never planned for this,” he said, holding her, hugging her against him, hearing the sound of the water and the sound of her breathing....

  Chapter Two

  “Do you think, Paul—well—what do you think?” She looked at Rubenstein as they rode along the level grasslands to intersect the highway leading nearest to the Retreat. He didn’t answer her—and she started to raise her voice over the throb of the Harleys’ engines, to repeat her ques­tion. “Paul—I wanted to know—do you—”

  She watched as he took his eyes from the path of the bikes, as his left hand moved slowly upward, pushing the wire-rimmed glasses off the bridge of his nose. “I heard you—I just didn’t know what to answer you. I didn’t know what to think—to say—I don’t know-“

  “You think I’m crazy?” And she slowed the Har­ley under her, arcing it in a wide circle in the grass of the gently rolling field, a house distantly visible, but no sign of human habitation beyond that, and no sign of occupancy. Rubenstein’s bike slowed ahead of her, turning in a lazy circle back toward her, Natalia watching as the wind tossed his thin­ning hair, tossed the high, uncut grass as well, hearing the evenness of the Harley’s engine. Then the silence as the engine cut out, like her own had.

  “What do you want me to say? That I think John should have two wives? Remember, Jews aren’t polygamous. And neither are Russians, I hear—so I can’t tell you anything more than you know yourself, Natalia.”

  “But—” She looked down at the controls of her machine—they were unchanging. She rested her hands on the flap coverings of her belt holsters, feeling the weight of the two L-Frame Smith & Wessons in the gunbelt at her hips. “I just—ahh—I don’t—”

  “John wants you to stay—and you want to stay. And for what it matters,” and she watched his eyes behind his glasses. “For what it matters—well—I want you to stay, too—I do—” The background silence broke, Paul Rubenstein’s Harley gunning to life. He just looked at her, Natalia hearing his voice above its throb. “Ready?”

  She nodded to him—but it might have been a lie....

  She had insisted on using the road—crossing the rougher country was difficult with Paul’s wound, difficult for him, pain etched more deeply across his face with each bump and twist. And the high­way was faster as well. And it was only a few miles to ride. She had given herself all of these argu­ments and then given them to Paul—and Paul Rubenstein had relented.

  A peacefulness had come about her now—the peacefulness that she had sometimes felt in her life when destiny was beyond her control. John Rourke would find his Sarah, and Michael, and Annie. What would happen after that would hap­pen. Rourke had ordered her to stay—and she would. Two men in her life she had felt merited her obedience—her uncle, General Ishmael Varakov, supreme comman­der of Soviet Forces of the North American Army of Occupation, and Doc­tor John Thomas Rourke—she rolled the name on her tongue.

  When she had met and married Vladmir Kara­matsov, she had thought she had fallen in love—but she had realized soon that she had been taken in. She was the niece of one of the Soviet Union’s most highly placed military commanders, the So­viet Union’s most respec­ted soldier of World War II—and he was the hero of World War III, she knew, but his praises would never be sung. Rather than a bath of blood, he had sought to handle his task with as much equanimity as possible, to treat the conquered American people—she smiled at that, for Americans truly seemed unconquerable on the most fundamental of levels—to treat them like people, with dignity. To get his job done—the job of supplying the Soviet war effort in Asia against the Chinese Communists, but to restrain the KGB from its intended purge—had brought her uncle into conflict with her husband, and it was this conflict that had led to her husband’s abuse of her body, of her soul—had led to her un­cle’s constructing events in such a way that John Rourke had no choice but to kill her husband.

  Her Uncle Ishmael—she smiled at the thought. A humanist, a good humanist—and perhaps because of that, he was a better Communist than all of them.

  And John Rourke—as dedicated an anti-Com­munist as she had ever known, as she had ever thought could exist, but capable of great tender­ness, of love, of understanding. And she loved both men—the Communist general and the anti-Communist doctor and survivalist. And both men loved her. It was a happiness that she felt—despite the aftermath of global thermonuclear war. And the idea of happiness was itself ridiculous.

  But Natalia Anastasia Tiemerovna, major, Committee for State Security of the Soviet, felt it—happiness—anyway.

  She wanted to say something to Paul—that she loved him deeply like she would love a brother, or a close friend—she had had neither.

  She turned her face, her hair caug
ht in the slip­stream of the air around her and the Harley that throbbed between her legs. She looked at Rubenstein as she brushed hair back from her eyes.

  She felt stupid, shouting it to him. “I’m happy, Paul!”

  They were starting into a curve as they passed beneath an outstretching roadside oak to their right, the angle of the road dropping steeply left, an abandoned roadside store on the left perhaps forty yards ahead. In the gravel parking lot be­tween the store and the road were more than a dozen men on motorcycles or standing beside them. Heavily armed, the men were Brigands.

  She swung her M-16 forward on its sling. She slowed her bike. She looked at Paul Rubenstein—his German MP-40 submachine gun was in his right fist. She felt a tear at the inside corner of her right eye. Natalia Anastasia Tiemerovna, major, Committee for State Security of the Soviet, told herself the tear in her eye was only from the wind. It had been foolish—dangerous—to feel happy.

  Chapter Three

  He laughed when he thought of it— “trigger con­trol.” It had been his slogan, his watchword, so long—but so little time—ago. Paul Rubenstein pumped the Schmeisser’s trigger, a neat three-round burst across the forty yards or so separating him and Natalia from the dozen Brigands, pumped the burst toward the nearest of the two Brigands raising assault rifles toward them. And the Brigand—a tall, beefy man wearing a sleeve­less blue denim jacket—doubled up jacknife fash­ion, falling forward.

  A sharper, louder crack, hot brass pelting at his left cheek—Natalia’s M-16, a long burst, the sec­ond rifleman going down, his legs cut from under him, gunfire raining toward them now as others of the Brigand band opened fire, motorcycles start­ing out of the gravel parking lot, skidding into the loop of highway that flanked the lot on two sides.

  “Back the other way!” Natalia was screaming. Rubenstein fired another burst, then another and another, the comparatively mild recoil shocking his body, bringing a wash of cold sweat to him, his arms aching like a bad tooth. He started cutting the Harley into a steep arc, firing another burst, downing still another of the Brigand bikers, the Brigand’s machine—a Japanese bike dripping chrome and gleaming like something just off a showroom floor—skidding across the highway. The Brigand was screaming, dragged behind it, the bike’s engine roaring, sparks showering up from the road surface, then a scream more hid­eous than anything Paul Rubenstein had ever heard— a shriek. The Brigand’s left leg, as the ma­chine whiplashed against a rock of massive pro­portions, the rock a barrier between the corner of the gravel lot and the loop of highway—the left leg was torn away, the bike exploding as it struck the boulder-sized rock, a spray of flaming gasoline belching laterally across the loop of highway then rising, the amputated leg of the Brigand like a flaming log, the Brigand himself screaming again as flames engulfed his thrashing body.

  Rubenstein fired out the Schmeisser’s magazine through the sheet of flame, a Brigand biker crash­ing through it, bouncing to the highway, clothes and hair and face on fire.

  Rubenstein let the Schmeisser drop to his side on its sling, snatching the battered Browning High Power from the web tanker style shoulder rig under his field jacket, jacking back the hammer with his thumb. He fired once—the Brigand biker, a human torch, dropped, the burning arms and hands slapping up toward the face, the face like the burning head of a match. What had been a man fell.

  Rubenstein gunned the Harley, Natalia twenty yards back along the road by now, her machine stopped, the M-16 held in both her hands as she twisted in the bike seat, spraying death behind them.

  He shouted to her over the crackle of flames and gunfire— “Run for it!”

  He shot his machine past her, hearing her ma­chine rev on the whistle of the slipstream.

  Paul Rubenstein looked behind him—Natalia was coming, riding low over her Harley, Brigand bikers—at least six of them—starting out of the loop of highway and following.

  Chapter Four

  The M-16’s thirty-round magazine spent, she let the rifle fall on its sling, dismissing it as she leaned her weight forward over the Harley, tucking her body down against the gunfire of the pursuing Brigands.

  Paul Rubenstein was ahead of her, his machine weaving—perhaps to avoid Brigand gunfire, per­haps the pain in his arm making him weak. She didn’t know.

  Natalia kept riding.

  There was a roar behind her and she looked back.

  One of the Brigand bikers—he was breaking away from the rest, a three-wheeled trike, the roar of its engine loud. She stared at the machine. From what she could tell it was no real bike at all—something customized, hand built, chrome pipes gleaming every­where, a chrome-plated auto­mobile-sized engine between the single front wheel and the rear wheels, just behind the driver’s seat. There was a rippling, exploding sound, the bike up on its rear wheels for an instant, then rocketing toward her, a cloud of exhaust fumes rising in its wake.

  The face of the man driving it—lips wide back from the bared teeth, snarling, one eye gone, the right one. In the left hand she saw a shotgun, the barrels short, no buttstock at all, as far as she could see.

  The double side-by-side barrels were raising to­ward her as the three-wheeled machine gained on her.

  Natalia reached her right hand to the Safariland flap holster at her right hip, her fingers curling around the smooth, memory-grooved Goncalo Alves stocks, the L-Frame Smith & Wesson in her fist as she wrenched it from the leather.

  She punched the Metalife Custom .357 Mag­num out, toward the man with the shotgun com­ing at her on the trike. If he fired first—she would be dead or worse, she knew. She double-actioned the slab-side barreled revolver, the wheelgun bucking in her right hand, the face of the Brigand biker seeming to erupt at the bridge of the nose and between the eyes. The shotgun discharged, both barrels, Natalia turning her face away, hear­ing a roar then a roar louder than the shotgun blasts had been, feeling heat sear at her right hand. She turned to fire again—but the trike, the biker, a massive oak tree growing close out of the side of the road—the bizarre machine had climbed it, hung from it now as flames rained down in chunks of burning flesh and debris and the trike and the biker who had ridden it were gone.

  She holstered the L-Frame, one of two given her by the de facto President of U.S. II, Samuel Chambers—in her mind’s eye she could see the American Eagles engraved on the right barrel flats, remember the look in Rourke’s eyes as Chambers had awarded her the guns, his token of thanks—

  She was Russian, fighting Americans, fighting Russians, too, by hiding from them—at war with her own KGB—at war with her own heart.

  Natalia screamed into the wind—

  The Brigand bikers had given up their pursuit.

  Chapter Five

  Rourke slowed the jet-black Harley Low Rider. He eased the bike into a stop, letting down the stand, dismounting, sliding the CAR-15 forward on its sling.

  He stood beside the Harley, listening. He could hear faint clicking sounds as the Harley’s engine cooled, but, above these, he heard the sounds that had precipitated the Night of The War—the sounds of advancing Soviet tanks.

  The CAR-15’s pistol grip clenched tight in his right fist, he walked ahead, leaving the Harley by the side of the road—a dirt track leading from one main highway to another through farms and woods.

  He entered the woods now, moving slowly, pushing aside overhanging branches, not break­ing them, ducking the larger ones, squinting against the cool sunlight through his dark-lensed aviator-style sunglasses. He moved the short, dark tobacco cigar with his tongue from the right side of his mouth across his teeth to the left, clenching it there, still unlit.

  The sound of the tanks was louder. He kept walking, the ground rising suddenly, dramati­cally ahead of him.

  He slipped the rifle slightly further forward, its muzzle plug already pocketed, the lens caps for the Colt three-power scope already removed, pocketed in his brown leather bomber jacket like the muzzle cap.

  His right thumb played against the Colt rifl
e’s safety lever, the ball of his thumb rubbing against it, the safety off because there was no round in the CAR-15’s chamber. Aboard a bike in rough country, it was safer to travel that way.

  The tree cover thinned as the ground rose, Rourke stopping near its edge, listening.

  Tanks—many tanks.

  “Tanks a lot,” he almost whispered, smiling at his own joke. He eared back the CAR-15’s bolt, chambering the top round out of the thirty-round stick.

  He chewed down harder on the cigar, flicking the safety to “on” and finding the Zippo in his Levis pocket. He flicked back the cowling, roll­ing the striking wheel under his thumb, poking the tip of the cigar into the blue-yellow flame. He eyed the initials on the old Zippo—J.T.R.

  He pocketed the lighter.

  Inhaling the smoke deep into his lungs, he walked from the tree line, glancing right and left and ahead, searching for anything that didn’t be­long as his ears focused the bulk of his attention on the sound of the tanks.

  The ground was rising sharply now, and he judged that he’d be able to view the tanks from the lip of the rise.

  Rourke walked ahead, dropping into a crouch as he approached the height of the rise.

  Chewing down on the cigar as he inhaled, he dropped onto his knees and elbows, raising his ri­fle into his fists as he moved on, then stopped. There was no need for binoculars, or even the scope on the CAR-15—at the distance of perhaps a quarter-mile, the ten tanks traveling in column along what had once been an interstate highway were visible enough. The tanks were thirty-nine plus ton T-72s, fitted with 125mm smooth-bore turret guns—more powerful than anything U.S. II might possibly have to throw against them.

  The confidence of the tankers upset him most of all—they traveled with hatches up and open, heads and shoulders protruding above the hatches, men sitting on the tank bodies, hitching rides—Soviet soldiers.