Survivalist - 21.5 - The Legend (11 page)

It was the thought of seeing John again whieh drove her, bom as an added inducement for traveling here, back to Georgia, and immersing herself in her work even more so than usual.

Because he was never out of her mind.

And, as she looked up, John stepped forward, taking Elaine’s arm; and John looked toward her and their eyes met and she looked down at her dress just to control her breathing.

In a moment, John would give the bride away, then sit down again.

Natalia would be standing less than six feet from him.

As Natalia looked at the little bouquet clutched in her hands, the petals of the flowers there trembled …

John looked-Natalia had no words to form the thought.

There was a little weariness in his eyes, but he looked happy, and the uniform of a brigadier general of Mid-Wake’s Marines (all the men of the wedding party wore military dress uniforms) became him, although she knew he was uncomfortable wearing it.

Sam Aldridge, a very good looking man, wore the same uniform, more ribbons, less rank, but somehow it didn’t look the same on Sam.

Dress blue.

He looked-She smiled, looking away. “Natalia.”

She turned, faced him.

John’s hands touched gently at her upper arms and his face bent over hers and she raised her chin, his mouth touching at her lips, then gone. He held her close for the briefest instant. “You look exquisite,” he told her.

“So do you,” she laughed, looking down at her hands. They trembled, and her breathing was short, shallow, and her face felt warm and flushed.

“Would you walk with me?”

“Yes.”

He placed her right hand into the crook of his left elbow and they started across the floor, toward the doorway which would lead into the nearly completed corridor. The room-the wedding and now the reception filled it-would someday be the seat of Eden’s new government, the only portion of the structure fully completed, me complex begun by Dodd but never finished.

They passed Jason Darkwood, Jason coming to attention, bowing slightly to her. Paul and Annie were huddled in a corner with Elaine and Akiro and Colonel Mann and Sarah (thank God John had told her about it and through John she had come to believe in, that Sarah didn’t look).

At the doorway, John leaned forward, opening a door for her which she passed through, gathering her dress around her, John behind her. The door closed, and she felt his hands on her arms, turning her around. She was powerless to say or do anything.

“You look well, Natalia.”

His brown eyes were so deep, so clear.

“You look just tired and happy enough to be enjoying your new hospital.”

He smiled. “I am.” She shivered, half from the feelings just having him look at her gave her, half from the colder air here.

Almost instantly, John began unbuttoning his uniform jacket, slipped out of it, folded it around her shoulders, enormous on her, the warmth of his body still in the fabric. She saw the butt of the little Smith & Wesson revolver on its Barami HipGrip just to the left of the center of his body. Some things never changed. She drew the coat tightly around her. She wanted him to say that he missed her, that he loved her, knew that perhaps he had said it when he told her she looked well. And she cursed herself for loving him, but wouldn’t have wanted not to love him, because loving him, was that around which, her entire existence pivoted, had ever since she had opened her eyes in the desert after he and Paul found her; perhaps ever since she had seen him that very first time in Latin America when they were agents on opposing sides for countries locked in conflict.

Natalia could not look at him anymore without dying inside, but if she turned around he might touch her and she would fall apart and cry. “I will be leaving sometime tomorrow. They tell

me, Colonel Mann’s personal plane is dropping off Paul and Annie and then flying on to Europe with me.”

“If you want to teach, soon there’ll be children enough here. I just delivered one this morning, a boy.”

“The first of the Eden children? Premature?”

“Yes, but healthy, both mother and son. I avoided a C-Section, for the obvious reasons. She was a little afraid, but that’s per-fectiy natural.”

Sometimes, when she thought about children, her breasts ached. But the only man whom she had ever met, whose children she wanted to bear, was married to one of the two finest women she had ever met, that woman’s daughter, Natalia’s best friend. “I am happy it worked out, John. You would like the doctor the Germans have sent us to help with the Wild Tribe children, a very fine and patient man.”

“That’s marvelous. May I come and see your school sometime?”

“Ohh, I would love that, and the children would love to meet the hero of the War. They talk about you-they like to practice talking every chance they get-and the boys, especially, sometimes they play at war and I don’t like it, but all the boys want to be you. You are their hero, but then you are my hero as well.”

John looked embarrassed.

She started to laugh.

He asked, “What’s so funny?”

“You and I are very funny, aren’t we?”

And John reached out and held her hands and if she used all her concentration maybe she could keep them from trembling, keep herself from swooning like some silly girl in a romantic novel. “I wish I had something fresh to say, something new that would resolve-“

“We don’t have a problem, John. You live here and I live there. Sarah looks radiant. And very pregnant. You are the most fortunate of men.”

“I know that, at least sometimes I think I do.”

She bit her lower lip, leaned her head against his chest and he took her into his arms and she felt his breath on his skin and wanted to drown in it…

He could not count on support from the Neo-Nazis as long as there was the significant likelihood that Akiro Kurinami would be elected President of Eden. The election could be done away with easily enough, of course, but there was the matter of the damnable, Doctor John Thomas Rourke, his insistent interference in support of outmoded values, the critical factor that could not be dismissed.

The idea of people being sufficiently mentally fit to govern themselves had ended in disaster the last time, nearly wiping out all of humanity and could not be allowed to take control again under any circumstances now.

Commander Christopher Ignatius Dodd sat at the command console of Eden One, hands on the armrests of his command chair, his eyes peering at his own image reflected there in the windshield against the stormy darkness, the command compartment surrouaiing him. The effect was like that of a beacon in the night. He would be that beacon to the true people.

Five centuries ago, he had learned the truth, that the incipient weakness in the United States was the result of racial inferiors mbreeding with the Aryan people. And then, without knowing it, he became taxi driver supreme to the racial inferiors, helping the mongrels to return to Earth to destroy it again.

And John Rourke disgusted him.

That Rourke, as Aryan certainly as any man could be, despite his Irish surname, had allowed his only daughter, a beautiful white woman, to marry the Jew Rubenstein was nauseatingly indicative of the degeneracy which had caused the United States to be driven to destruction. And Rourke, all but singlehandedly, toppled the government of New Germany, giving the weakling, short-sighted fringe members of that once-glorious society, their disgusting democracy, deposing a man whose very essence so perfectly defined Aryan superiority as to make him godlike.

As long as John Rourke survived, to support the Japanese who had just married the black, the mongrelization of the new Earth would progress unabated. That a yellow man fucked a black woman by sanction of a pseudo-religion that had no resemblance to the true Christianity was of little concern, but that they should live to threaten the order which mankind so desperately required

was an abomination against nature.

And the power which he, Dodd, so justly deserved, based on ability and service and, perhaps, Divine Providence, would be unjustly denied.

Without his-Dodd’s-leadership and courage, not a single one of the shuttle fleet which had been launched on The Night of The War and travelled an eliptical course to the edge of the solar system and back while computers maintained life support and the crew of 120 slept, not a single vessel of the fleet would have returned, no one would have have survived. Not even John Rourke or Akiro Kurinami would have disputed that.

But how quickly that was forgotten.

Because of Rourke.

It could rightfully be said he-Dodd-had given life to the planet. Mid-Wake, with its blacks and Jews and orientals and mongrelized so-called whites was not a fit starting place for life, nor were either of the Soviet enclaves, on land or beneath the sea. Only New Germany had been a chance for humanity, but thanks to Rourke-With Rourke out of the way, Kurinami could be liquidated in a convincing manner and no one would be the wiser, he-Dodd-could step in, lead, eventually weeding out the racial inferiors, and bring about a new order on this reborn earth.

The Russians were powerless now, their land forces demobilized and disarmed, their undersea forces so pacified that no submarine warships remained to them and their mini-subs were strictly monitored.

Eventually, the Russians-Slavs and, as such, racial inferiors-could be dealt with.

The new power would grow, Eden its center of energy, and New Germany, its first logical convert.

But it all hinged on Doctor John Rourke, strutting about in his Mid-Wake brigadier general’s uniform, courting the Communist Bitch, Tiemerovna, before the very eyes of Rourke’s pregnant wife.

Sarah Rourke was strong, so if he could liquidate her as well, all the better.

The Jew, Rubenstein, would protest, would accuse, but could be dealt with like any Jew.

The key was John Rourke, and tonight that key would-be turned. Forever…

She felt like a giant blue Easter egg, and standing still, hurt her back more than walking.

So, with her lined German field jacket over the bridesmaid’s dress she wore, she walked, alone along the single street which had formed between the shelters erected by the Eden Project Crew. She had slipped out of the reception, then slipped out of her Chinese shoes, into her combat boots.

She looked down at herself and laughed, thinking perhaps that although she felt like a giant blue Easter egg, she looked more like a fat man in drag.

It was cold, the street, the literal embodiment of the term “windswept.”

Sarah Rourke understood the symbolic meaning of Akiro’s and Elaine’s wedding being held in Eden, but it would have been a vastly more comfortable affair had it been held at the recently restored and expanded German base just outside Eden. The heat was better, the washrooms (pregnant women became connoisseurs of toilet facilities) better, too.

She considered the name, “Eden.”

Perhaps history did repeat itself, and perhaps the snake in the Garden had been less literal than figurative.

There was a logical candidate for snake here, the same man who was the candidate for President running opposite Akiro Kurinami.

Yet, if this cold, dreary place with its political uncertainty and petty jealousies were “Eden,” it would be hard to imagine why Adam and Eve would have be discouraged to be tossed out on their ear.

A hell in the making, perhaps, but not an Eden.

Of course, neither she nor John could vote, because neither of them was an Eden Project survivor. Up until 1920, of course, as a woman, she could not have voted anywhere in the United States, except the state of Wyoming.

About one hundred people, all the survivors remaining from

the Eden Project and only they, would determine what would certainly be the future of the United States, someday perhaps the destiny of this new world,

She had actually heard one of the Eden survivors, whom logic and common sense would have dictated to be too intelligent to harbor such thoughts, murmuring under his breath, ‘Think of the children” as Akiro, a Japanese, had married Elaine, an Afro-American.

Think of the children indeed, with brilliant and courageous parents who would love and nurture them, teach them, respect them, prepare them to make this new world a better place than the old one had been.

Think of the children of the man who had made that remark, growing up to inherit a father’s mindless bigotry.

Sarah Rourke dug her hands into the jacket’s muff pockets, walking toward her husband’s hospital where, in a short while, she would deliver the baby she carried within her …

John Rourke smoked one of Natalia’s cigarettes, sitting beside her just inside the entrance to what would someday be the seat of Eden government. He was a little cold, but Natalia required his jacket, so he dismissed the cold, smoked the cigarette.

There were so many things he wanted to tell Natalia.

Yet there were so many reasons why he could tell her nothing.

He loved Natalia Tiemerovna and he loved Sarah Rourke, loved them equally. And Sarah was his wife.

Natalia leaned her pretty head against his shoulder. “Do you think there is anything to what the Hindus believed?”

He just looked at her, not quite taking her meaning because he had been into his own thoughts.

Natalia whispered, That perhaps in another life we-“

Transmigration of souls?” Rourke smiled. “I don’t know. I long ago taught myself to discount no theory until it had been thoroughly disproven, so I won’t discount the possibility. Why?”

Natalia laughed. “Men are amazing.”

“I don’t think that was a compliment.”

“It wasn’t, John. Why would I be thinking about another life instead of this one?”

He thought that he might suspect an answer, but it would be such a terribly conceited sounding thing to say.

Natalia said, “Men can be so emotionally obtuse, at times, it is hard to comprehend. I meant that if there is another life in store for us, I hope that then, maybe, we will be able to be together. This life is no longer a viable proposition.”

“I really messed you up, and I’m sorry.”