Rourke stood up, walking toward the river bank, studying the water, the tip of his cigar, the toes of his black combat boots. He heard her voice behind him, the words difficult to understand through the sounds of her tears. "Did they bomb Florida?" But the girl didn't wait for him to answer as he turned to face her. He watched as she stared straight ahead into the trees.
"Well— then we're right. The night of the bombing."
"The Night of the War?" Rourke almost whispered. "The bombing did something that shouldn't have been possible, but it created an artificial fault line— I guess you'd call it that. The instruments we had implanted all up and down the coast went insane when the bombs dropped that night. But they were built to withstand massive shock and most of them held up. We then found a fault line that wasn't there before the War, gradually growing. It could be days from now, just a few, but it could also be hours. There's going to be an earthquake, one of the most massive ever recorded. There could be thousands of people killed. Maybe millions. I don't know how many people there are down there since the War began. But soon—" The girl sobbed heavily. Rourke took a few steps nearer to her, then dropped to one knee beside her. "Soon, there's going to be an earthquake along that new fault line, and it will separate the Florida peninsula from the rest of the continent and the peninsula will crash down into the sea. There should be tidal waves all along the coast, into the Gulf too. But the whole Florida Peninsula will disappear from the face of the earth."
The girl looked up at him, turning around awkwardly because of her wounds. Rourke saw something pleading in her eyes and he folded her into his arms, letting her cry against his chest.
"So many, so many people— Jesus," the girl cried.
Rourke looked down into the girl's hair, then over his shoulder toward the ferry boat. The motorcycle on the deck was almost completely out of gasoline after the high-speed chase. "Paul," Rourke whispered.
"My God..."
Rourke let the girl cry for a while— the tension of everything that had happened to her demanded it, he realized. He guessed she'd been close to some of the people who had died in the San Andreas quake that had wiped out California. And now she saw it happening all over again. She said nothing else yet, but Rourke realized now why she had been sent by the others of her team. The knowledge of the impending disaster had forced them to do something. Rourke wondered silently if Cuba or perhaps the Russians could be somehow alerted to help in the evacuation. Certainly the government of United States II should be told. All three had a stake in the population of Florida. Rourke wondered how many men, women, and children had survived the Night of the War, the reported Communist Cuban occupation.
There was his own search for Sarah and the children to consider. But perhaps they would be near the coast where the tidal waves provide a built-in warning as the tides begin rising. There would at least be a chance for them, Rourke thought. But his friend Paul Rubenstein was likely in Florida by now. There would be no chance for him. Rourke thought about the young man. Before the Night of the War, neither had known the other existed. And in the space of a few hours after the crash of the diverted jetliner they had all ridden, Rourke and Paul Rubenstein—
ultimately the only two survivors from the passengers and crew— had begun the friendship that had carried them across two-thirds of the United States. Rourke suddenly realized he had no idea why the New York City-based editor with a trade magazine had been in Canada to begin with and headed toward Atlanta. Rourke shook his head, a smile crossing his lips.
Rourke thought about himself a moment. He had made few friends in his life, had always had few relatives. "Friends," he whispered under his breath. Sarah, his wife, had always been his friend— perhaps that was why they had argued so much before the War, wasting hours they hadn't bothered to tally. Natalia— his most curious friend, he thought. He remembered their meeting in Texas that had led to Rourke's having a final showdown with her KGB husband, killing him. Rourke realized she probably hated him now. The one friend was Paul Rubenstein.
"I'll help you," Rourke whispered to the girl, her head against his chest and her sobbing subsiding now.
"We can take the ferry boat downriver. I think I can find a contact in Army Intelligence in Savannah. We can do something to try to get some of the people out before it happens. I don't really know how much we can do, how many people can be evacuated— however it's done. But you and your colleagues were right," he told her. "Something has to be done. And I guess now it's up to both of us."
The girl looked up at him, her green eyes still wet with tears, her face paler than it should have been. Rourke decided it was the loss of blood, the shock of the bullet wounds she'd sustained. He wondered how his own face looked. But it was a decision he had to make, he realized. The immediate search for Sarah, Michael, and Ann— his family. Perhaps Paul was like a brother he'd never had, Rourke thought, smiling, amused at himself. He remembered Sarah once telling him that it was cold-blooded to plan for survival if most of your fellow men could not survive. Their perennial argument over his preparation for disaster and her optimism concerning world peace had been forever resolved on the Night of the War when bitter reality had proven his case. But the one thing he'd never been able to make her understand was that he had no illusions that survival alone would be survival. It was the enlightened self-interest of love that made him search for Sarah and his two children, Rourke realized. And it was the
"selfishness" of friendship that compelled him now to find Paul Rubenstein. Rourke had buried his father years earlier, his mother not long after that. If the Night of the War had taught him anything, Rourke thought, it was that a human life was too precious not to fight for.
Chapter 4
Sarah Rourke rested her hands on the saddle horn. Tildie's head dipped down as the horse browsed at a patch of grass. Sarah's eyes scanned the valley beneath the low hill on which they'd stopped. She looked behind her. Michael sat easily in the saddle of her husband's big off-white horse, Sam. She smiled at little Annie, the girl waving to her. Shaking her head, almost not believing the children could have endured what they had, she studied her hands. The nails were trimmed short and there was dirt under them. She had always kept her nails long, even with the farm, the children, the horses, her illustrating. At least the nails on her left hand had been nearly perfect, she thought, smiling. She looked at the gold wedding band, wondering if somewhere still in the world its mate was on a living hand like her own. She cooed to the horse under her as it started to move, raising both her hands to the nape of her neck to retie the blue and white bandanna over her hair. Was John Rourke actually alive? she wondered.
Mary Mulliner's farm, she remembered. She could have stayed there, forever if she had wanted to, the children having an island of normality in the world or what was left of it. But she had packed the saddlebags, the dufflebag, cleaned the assault rifle she'd taken from one of the men who'd tried to rape and kill her. She'd gotten Mary's red-headed son to show her how to
"field strip"— that was what he had called it— the rifle and her husband's Colt .45 automatic. She'd saddled her own horse that morning. Annie had cried, and Michael had talked of how he would take care of Annie, and his mother as well. It was summer now, though by the weather she realized she would have never guessed that. Turning and looking at her two children, she murmured, "Michael will be seven." She shook her head in disbelief. Six years old and he had killed a man to save her life; six years old and the boy had saved her life again after she'd drunk contaminated water. The corners of her gray-green eyes crinkled with a smile— the resemblance between Michael and his father wasn't just physical. She studied the boy's face, the dark eyes, the thick, dark hair. The forehead was lower; but Michael was still a boy, she reminded herself. The shoulders, the leanness about him. But it was the strength the boy seemed to have inside of him that at once heartened and sometimes terrified her. He was John all over— loving, analytical, practical, yet a dreamer too. It had taken the War, she realized, to understand that John Rourke's preoccupation with survivalism had not been nightmarish, but a dream for going on when civilization itself failed. She smiled again. She could no more see the War or its aftermath killing her husband John than it had killed Michael— and Michael was here, with her now.