No time for the CAR-15, Rourke’s right hand flashed under his brown leather bomber jacket, snatching at the Pachmayr gripped butt of the stainless Detonics there. As the Soviet soldier raised his AKM, Rourke fired, the pistol bucking in his hand.
The soldier’s face took the 185-grain JHP—the center of the face collapsing in the redness of blood as the man fell back.
A second soldier—Rourke shot him twice in the chest, Rourke’s left arm going out, his left fist straight-arming a third soldier in the chest, knocking the man back and down. Rourke jumped, his left leg snaking over the seat of the Harley Low Rider. He got the stand up, firing the Harley’s engine, pumping the trig-ger of the Detonics into the chest and abdomen of a fourth Soviet soldier. The little Detonics was empty, the slide locked back. He thumbed down the stop, letting the slide run forward, ramming the pistol into his belt. A fifth Soviet soldier— Rourke’s left leg snapped up and out, the toe of his combat-booted foot catching the man in the groin as the soldier tried to bring his rifle to bear. Rourke gunned the Harley, almost losing his bal-ance, dragging his feet, keeping upright and tak-ing off along the dirt road.
The Low Rider was best suited to highway driv-ing, and making high speed on the bumpy, rutted dirt road was difficult, keeping it up harder—he let the machine out as much as he dared, keeping low over the handlebars as he looked back—one of the Soviet bikers was already coming, two more were mounting up.
Rourke’s right hand slipped down to the CAR-15, his thumb working the safety off—he twisted the muzzle behind him, firing once, twice, a third time, the Soviet biker nearest him skidding off into the trees to avoid Rourke’s fire. Rourke worked the safety again, letting the CAR-15 drop on its sling at his side, his attention wholly fo-cused now on riding.
Behind him, he could hear the sounds of bikes—the remaining two Soviets. He bent lower over the Harley—he made it there was at least an-other mile of the dirt track before he reached paved highway. A deep rut—Rourke skirted the machine around it, balancing out with his feet, then gun-ning the engine, jumping a huge bump, wrench-ing the machine up with his arms, gunfire from behind him now. He looked back again—two bikers close, a third fifty yards or so behind them. He couldn’t risk firing, the road too rutted for him to shift a hand from the handlebars. His body low across the jet black Harley, he kept rid-ing. There was a sharp bend right, Rourke’s ma-chine skidding through the curve, his right leg out, balancing the Harley, his right foot dragging through the mud as the road dipped, the Harley grinding, Rourke wrenching at the machine. Moving again—he kept the machine moving, through the curve and up the grade, the mud hard and rutted again, Rourke jumping the bike later-ally over a deep rut, the machine skidding, Rourke balancing it out. Still moving. A shouted curse from behind him—Rourke looked back, seeing one of the Soviet bikers down. He gunned the Harley, taking the grade, jump-ing a hummock of ground, the dirt road evening out, Rourke letting out the machine—ahead he could see paved road.
A ridge of packed hard mud and gravel—he jumped the Harley over it, nearly losing it, recov-ering, letting the bike skid almost out from under him as he angled the machine right—he was on the road. Balancing out, his feet up, he revved the Har-ley, the crackle of his exhaust loud, gunfire be-hind him as the coolness of the day turned into a chill slipstream around him, Rourke molding his body over the machine.
The road was a straight ribbon, black, recently paved, he guessed, before the Night of The War, the yellow double lines bright, fresh-painted.
Gunfire—the road surface behind him sparked with it as he looked back. Two of the Soviet bik-ers still pursued.
His exhaust rumbled, sputtered, made a sound that seemed to split the fabric of the air as he let the machine full out, the front wheel rising slightly, Rourke balancing as he fought the fork—and then the slipstream around him was harder, louder, colder, punching at his face, tear-ing at his hair—the gunfire was suddenly more distant.
He risked a look back once—the military bikes of the Soviet soldiers were fading in the distance. He chewed down once, hard, on his cigar butt, then spit it into the slipstream.
Chapter Six
There had been more Russians as Rourke had moved off the highway and kept to the side roads, the dirt tracks—more and more Russians. Supply convoys—tanks riding shotgun for them—moved along each major artery in the directions of cities large enough to have airports. He had spent hours watching them, unable to move because of them, waiting.
A truck had broken down—an axle, Rourke had guessed, watching from the distance with his Bushnell 8x30s. After some time of Russian offi-cers wandering about the truck, apparently shout-ing orders, cursing out the driver and the like, the truck had been unloaded.
Rourke had expected confiscated M-16s, or ex-plosives, or foodstuffs—even medical supplies. But when one of the crates had broken—more stomping around, more apparent name-calling and threatening—the contents had proven to be a microfilm projector. All of the cases inside the truck—as they were emptied out with meticu-lous care—were apparently possessed of the same con-tents. Rourke sat back, not looking at the road, con-sidering instead.
He studied the CAR-15 as he laid it across his lap—how many thousands of rounds had he fired through it? The parkerized finish of the thirty-round magazine up the well was badly scratched, but the magazine was wholly serviceable. Absent-mindedly, he wondered if his friend Ron Ma-hovsky, who had customized his Python, had survived the Night of The War. Rourke, retro-spectively, decided he should have asked Mahovsky to Metalife the CAR-15’s magazines for added durability. It was too late now—but many things were too late.
The microfilm projectors—why so many?
And he thought of Sarah, and Michael, and An-nie. The children would have changed—not the time, but the experience. And Sarah—he closed his eyes.
Before the Night of The War, they had always argued over his “preoccupation,” as she had called it,
“with gloom and doom, preparing for the un-thinkable”—his concerns with survival. She had seen guns as nothing more than weapons of de-struction.
Rourke studied the profiled CAR-15 across his thighs.
It was hard to consider a rifle a weapon of de-struction, considering the weapons unleashed on the Night of The War.
He closed his eyes—he remembered the flight across the United States that night—he could not forget it.
The children dying of burns in Albuquerque.
The teens who had called themselves the Guard-ians—in Texas. Their faces and their bodies scarred with radiation burns, their lives ending, their minds scarred and gone with the horror. He opened his eyes, staring at the gun—he had saved lives with it, tried righting wrongs. John Rourke closed his eyes again—he won-dered if Sarah had changed—at all.
Chapter Seven
She looked at Annie—it was like Annie was try-ing to be her little carbon copy. One of the men in the Resistance—a black man, Tom—had given Annie a bandanna handkerchief, blue and white. And Annie wore it tied over her hair now, like Sarah herself had habitually worn one since The Night of The War. She thought about that - when she had cleaned house, or been baking bread she’d always—but there was no house to clean, no house at all.
Sarah Rourke licked her lips, getting up from the fire-blackened ridge pole of the destroyed barn—fallen now. She had found it a favorite place to sit when she’d been outside the under-ground survival bunker beneath the burned-out Cunningham farmhouse.