“What are you—“
“Never mind!” It had been a miss. He fired again, connecting, but the chain didn’t break.
“You want the chain broken—just tell me about it,” Michael called from behind him.
Rourke lowered his rifle, then nodded. “I’m sorry I lost my temper. So use your cannon and break the chain.”
Michael stood beside him now, the Magnum Sales Stalker extended in both fists before him.
“Hold your ears, Natalia,” Rourke called, covering his own ears. The gleaming stainless steel revolver bucked once in Michael’s hands and he lowered it a moment, then raised it again to sight through the scope. The revolver fired again. Michael turned to his father. Rourke took his hands from his ears. “You watch yourself with that thing shooting indoors—gonna mess up your hearing.” “What?” and Michael laughed. “I couldn’t hear you.”
Rourke feigned a punch toward his son’s midsection, Michael dodging, laughing. Rourke felt two things inside himself as he walked toward the double doors, the lock shattered and obviously so—gladness for having Michael, and a sickness for what he thought he would find beyond the doors.
Chapter Fifty-Five
Rourke stood in the center of the room. Michael had gone back to Natalia.
There was a single stainless steel surgical table. Beside it was a covered tray.
He lifted the covering from the tray, folding back the white cloth.
He closed his eyes.
The Ministers had many sins. v
He opened his eyes.
He turned away and left the room, but some-thing caught his eye as he did and he stopped. Rourke walked toward a nearly emptied surgical cabinet. The top shelf held a large mortar and pestle.
The middle shelf was empty as was the lower shelf. There was fine dust in the bowl of the pestle— Madison had spoken of never experiencing medi-cal treatment. Michael had said the old one seemed to consider it a sin to attempt to prolong life. It was possible that the Ministers cheated on this, but Rourke doubted it.
Then there was only one other answer.
He shook his head and walked from the room.
He could see Natalia—she was on her knees by the combination dial for the vault.
Rourke kept walking, feeling very tired. He stopped, beside Natalia, handing
Michael his M-16. “Stand up—and hold me—please,” and he watched her eyes as she
looked up at him, as she got from her knees, as she looked at him again, then
her arms folding around him and Rourke leaned his face against her head. His
voice sounded off to him. “I thought we were through with it, ya know? With all
this insanity. Karamatsov is gone. Rozhdestvenskiy is gone. I thought it was all
gone with them. I really did. And then these cannibals—“ Rourke felt Natalia’s
hands touch at his neck—their coolness, their softness. “I really thought that
after all of this—“ and he laughed, holding her body tight against him. He felt
Michael’s hand on his shoulder. “I really—“
“Dad, what—“
Rourke licked his lips. He looked up, at his son, and at the woman he had not been supposed to love but did. “Inside that room—it’s a very basic surgery. I found tools—the kind you’d only use for one thing. And then evidence they were making pills—and two empty shelves. We’re going to open that vault—and every single person from here—“ “I found the combination. All I have to do is—“ “I’ll do it. Don’t come in unless I tell you to.”
“I can—“
“Please,” Rourke whispered, and he stepped away from Natalia a single step. He leaned his lips to her forehead, touching her there. Then he turned to the vaul’t door. He placed his left hand on the handle. “You want your rifle, Dad?” Michael asked.
Rourke only shook his head. He worked the handle downward hard, then pulled on the vault door, swinging it open. “Don’t go inside,” he Ol whispered, going inside.
The overhead light bulbs—he imagined they had found a way of making their own filaments and reusing the bulbs—were bright. He could see clearly. Nearly one hundred people—seven men in three-piece business suits and red bedroom slip-pers; seven women in elaborate re-creations of high fashion dresses from five centuries ago (but they too, incongruously, wore the red slippers); a half dozen children, two boys and four girls, in fashionably expensive looking clothing from five centuries ago, wearing diminutive versions of the red slippers; roughly seventy-five men and women and children in gray slippers, the men wearing the off-white jackets of busboys, the women in severe gray maids’ uniforms, the children dressed iden-tically to the older members of their caste. Infants as well. A few of the business-suited men were missing—the ones from the fight in the cave and the attack of the cannibals, Rourke surmised. Those men were dead. And so was everyone in the room.
Rourke dropped to his knees beside the body of a dead little boy—one of the servant class, a descendant of one of the former masters who had begun it all five centuries earlier. Rourke’s right hand reached out to the boy, the boy sitting against the back of a man, a woman’s head resting in the boy’s lap. Rourke closed the boy’s eyes, and then he closed his own… “Dad!”
Rourke didn’t open his eyes. “Stay outside with Natalia, son,” and then he opened his eyes and he stood, staring down at the dead clustered around him. He began to walk the length of the vault, stepping over the dead, stopping to examine a dead child or a dead woman or a dead man to be certain—but they were all dead.
He found the old one, knowing it was the man Michael had spoken of. The watch chain—Rourke held up the key, letting it sway a moment pendulum fashion. Rourke shook his head, then bent to the man-he replaced the key and closed the man’s eyes.
The far end of the room—he started toward it now. Cloth bags were there—the shapes were enough to show him, stacked one atop the other. Generations of the Families.
He looked at the old one. “For what?” John Rourke whispered.
He would not have expected an answer even if any of them had remained alive. There was a dead woman near his feet as he stopped near the vault door, her eyes dull but once pretty he knew. He looked at her right hand as he closed her eyes—the skin was rough textured from toil. If it were a symbol of poetic justice for the sins of her ancestors—if all of it were that, John Rourke thought. He shook his head, “Aww, shit,” and he stood up and walked back to the living.
Chapter Fifty-Six
“They’re all dead—mass murder or mass sui-cide, I don’t know which,” Rourke told them as he walked, again Natalia and Michael flanking him. “The surgery was used for castrations—the Coun-sel of Ministers realized what they had done sending people out into the outside world. Some of them survived by eating the others and there was no other way for the Ministers to reduce their population without sending out surplus people. So, they castrated the men. The reason we only saw men outside was because of the few who were strong enough to stay alive and be accepted into the cannibals—the ones Madison calls Them— none were women.” And he looked at Natalia. “Even if you were out there, with no weapons, no martial arts training—you wouldn’t have had a prayer.”
“I disagree,” Natalia said flatly.
Rourke put his right arm around her shoulders for an instant, then found her left hand and held it as they continued walking. “Likely the cannibals had enough sense left that when their numbers began dwindling, they’d let new members in—and the food was less needed. Population control for the outside world as well. Involuntary—just like it was inside. You said,” and he looked at Michael, “that one or two of them shouted ‘meat’ as they attacked. They were probably some of the more recent acquisitions to the tribe—they still retained some language that was recognizable. There isn’t any village—they wander, eating what they can off the land and waiting for their ration of meat. And they were never disappointed. Never at all. But they can’t reproduce sexually at all. And with their meat supply gone, some of them will starve to death and the rest of them will just die off naturally. Ten years from now, maybe twenty— none of them will be left. It’ll be as if none of them ever existed. A five-centuries-old tribe, which split in two, completely extinct—except for Madison. Some of them—some of them out there now. Some of them still probably have language abilities, but using language like we know it would have been so rare that it just ceased being necessary. Some of them—we could probably talk with them, bring the language back to them.”