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.