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 re-member.
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 drift-ing 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 rush-ing, 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 whis-pered, 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 ques-tion. “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 Har-ley 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 thin-ning 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 high-way was faster as well. And it was only a few miles to ride. She had given herself all of these argu-ments 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 hap-pen. 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 comman-der of Soviet Forces of the North American Army of Occupation, and Doc-tor John Thomas Rourke—she rolled the name on her tongue.
When she had met and married Vladmir Kara-matsov, 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 So-viet Union’s most respec-ted 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 un-cle’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-Com-munist as she had ever known, as she had ever thought could exist, but capable of great tender-ness, 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.