Survivalist - 22 - Brutal Conquest (6 page)

Michael Rourke cursed his lack of formal education. He knew so litde about computers, beyond the comparatively simple machine at The Retreat, that he could do no more than turn on Martin Zimmer’s unit. He could not access any of the files.

“Damnit,” he muttered under his breath.

Inside that computer would almost certainly be information concerning Dr. Deitrich Zimmer. And Deitrich Zimmer could well hold Michael’s mother’s life in his hands.

Michael Rourke left the desk with its computer console and walked along the near wall of Martin Zimmer’s almost ridiculously spacious office.

The only thing that pointed to Zimmer’s Nazi leanings was a small brass globe—or maybe it was gold—which was placed on a shelf in the large bookcase before which Michael Rourke now stood. Atop the globe was a small, almost meticulously delicate swastika… .

The building at the near end of the four structures was a livery stable.

The building beside it seemed to be some sort of pub-he house.

Mary Ann, bolder up until now, cowered by the low, wide doorway. “What’s the matter?” “My old manll be in there.” “Don’t you want to see him?”

“Yeah, but-“

The unfinished sentence hung there in the air between them. And John Rourke suddenly understood. Sarah or Annie or Natalia would have read the reaction an instant sooner, he realized. She was afraid of her old man … that somehow he would punish her for being gone.

John Rourke turned the knob on the cast-iron handle of the door and opened it.

The unmistakable smells of marijuana and green beer assailed his nostrils, mingling on the cold air with the animal odors from the stable next door.

John Rourke went through the doorway first… .

Michael Rourke walked along the corridor of the capitol building’s first floor, toward the staircase at its far end. Gunther Hong walked beside him. “I will show you, Martin, where our search teams are. The transponder signals on the situation map indicate the Rourke Family must be boxed in. We were able to field an SS Search and Destroy Team. I thought they needed the practice.”

“Wise decision,” Michael nodded, saying nothing else.

Instead of getting away, he was going deeper into Martin Zimmer’s seat of government. The building itself reminded him of hazy childhood memories and photographs he had seen of classic small town courthouses.

They reached the staircase and started downward… .

Natalia Tiemerovna stopped moving when she heard the low growl from behind her. Her mind raced. The Germans had maintained a controlled population of dogs a century ago. There was no reason to suppose … she

turned her head very slowly. The Chinese of the Second City had kept wolves.

Mouth dripping saliva from bared fangs, hind legs flexed, a descendant, presumably, of one of those wolves stood behind her.

“Paul, they’re too tired to go on.”

“I know,” Paul Rubenstein told his wife. Then he looked at Martin Zimmer’s face. Martin was obviously cold and otherwise uncomfortable. But he was laughing. “You keep laughing, buddy, you won’t have to worry about your father or your brother looking like you anymore. They’ll have faces and teeth.”

Martin Zimmer’s smile disappeared.

Annie said, “I’ll get them together.”

“Don’t let any of them get too comfortable,”’ Paul advised. “We might have to move out fast.”

The configuration of the terrain here was unrelieved flatness. If they were spotted from the air or pursued by a fast vehicle, there would be no place to hide and it would be a standoff at best, with Martin Zimmer as the sole bargaining chip. And to produce him might be sealing Michael’s death.

But the women were exhausted.

“Bring her over here. Come on,” Paul ordered, Zimmer not even nodding, but turning toward the gathering knot of twenty-two freed women, the twenty-third one on the litter he and Martin carried between them… .

The map of the Wildlands dominated an entire wall.

But it was only a computer screen. As Michael watched, he was able to discern the exact positions of the ground patrols sent out, he had hoped erroneously, after his family.” But one of the patrols was far from the others, on the western side of the rift valley.

“That is the SS?”

“Yes, Martin.”

“Why are they covering the wrong side of the valley?”

“It was only thought to be good sense, in case the Rourke Family attempted to trick us all by fleeing in the opposite direction.”

“And why would a man as clever as John Rourke do something like that?” Michael pressed. If he pressed too hard, or should try to order the withdrawal of the search and destroy team, he might only be signing his family’s death warrants, and his own as well.

“Well?”

Gunther Hong shrugged his skinny shoulders. “I can recall them if you wish, Martin.”

Michael Rourke looked at the map position. “How many men in all?”

“Fifteen —twelve SS and three Land Pirates.”

“The scum. No. Let them waste their time, then.” Michael Rourke prayed they would be doing just that… .

Natalia had several possible solutions to her immediate dilemma. She merely had to fire a gun and kill the creature. But if she did so with an ordinary gun, the shot or shots would be heard by anyone who might be inside the building behind which she now stood statuelike, or inside the livery stable, or for that matter anywhere within the seven-building town. Even using her PPK/S with the suppressor would elicit yelps of pain from the animal. The same could be said if she used her knife. “Shit,” Natalia said out loud.

There was nothing to do but wait, and hope the wolf did the same… .

John Rourke held open the door just long enough for the terrified Mary Ann to follow him inside. Because of their natural light sensitivity, his eyes adjusted quickly to the darkness within. A crude lamp burned on either side of a large room, with rough-hewn wooden clapboard walls and erratically spaced support posts running between floor and ceiling. There was a fire burning in the stone hearth that dominated the far wall, and a cast-iron stove, black as night, was at the center of the room. Along the wall to his right was a bar of sorts, just a long table with a few men leaning against it, a few glasses near them and a few bottles of mixed sizes on a narrow counter behind it.

There were several tables scattered indiscriminately about the room, a few more men sitting in small groups at two of them.

Several of the men looked toward the doorway as John Rourke said, “I have a girl named Mary Ann with me. She’s related to somebody around here.”

“Related! Related? Ha!”

John Rourke looked toward the bar. One of the men leaning against it had spoken. He wore several layers of ragged clothing, all of it appearing filthy. Rourke noticed the butt of a pistol—at the distance it looked like a Beretta 92F—thrusting up from the waistband of baggy trousers, which were bound together with a length of frayed rope that looked nearly black.

“Ivan’s my old man, mister. We ain’t related none.”

Rourke didn’t look at Mary Ann as she spoke, but he nodded that he heard her.

“There be Ivan.”

Her right hand passed the edge of Rourke’s peripheral

vision and his eyes followed in the direction she pointed. A big man but young, sitting at one of the tables with two other men, seemed to be her old man, Ivan.

“My friends and I found Mary Ann a prisoner of the Land Pirates. My name’s John Rourke.”

Ivan spoke. “And I’m fuckin’ George Washington. Yes’erday I was Lenin and t’morrow I’m gonna be Lady Godiva!’ And he laughed, and the armed man at the bar—they were all probably armed—laughed, then some of the others joined in.

John Rourke stood where he was, saying nothing.

The laughter abruptiy stopped when Ivan snapped, “Get yo ass ove here, bitch!” Mary Ann scurried across the room to him, dropped to her knees at his feet, and made to put her head on his thigh. He kicked her away. She fell, sprawling onto the hard-packed dirt that comprised the floor. Ivan stood up. He was one of the largest human beings John Rourke had ever seen. “Them’s nice-lookin’ guns yo got. Gimme ‘em and maybe yo’ll walk outa here.”

John Rourke was taking a slow step left so the door wouldn’t be direcdy behind him, but there would be a solid wall instead. “We’re being pursued by the Eden Armed Forces and the Land Pirates. We have a lot of people in need of shelter from the cold. I need to borrow a horse, unless you’ve got a vehicle that runs.”

“They’s a lot o’ us. Jes’ one o’ you. Gimme ‘em guns.”

“Give ‘em to ‘im, hear!” This time it was the dirty man lounging beside the bar who spoke.

There were ten men, counting the bartender. Allied Intelligence indicated that these subminiature towns were occasionally nothing more than a den of thieves and killers. The usual armament was material scavenged from the batdefields following the conclusion of hostilities with the Soviets over a century ago, along with some old weapons from the original Eden i

i -

t stores, which dated back five centuries before that.

? The Beretta worn by the man at the bar was one such

item, the military pistol of the pre War United States armed forces. And John Rourke smiled as he thought of it. Before The Night Of The War, he’d known innumera-

, ble people in the firearms trade, Beretta personnel among them. They would have been proud to know that six centuries after manufacture their products were still in use. Michael himself carried two of them.

John Rourke’s own guns were more than six centuries old, too.

And he had no intention of parting with them. He told Ivan and the others, “I didn’t come here for trouble. I am John Rourke, but your acceptance of that as fact is immaterial at the moment. As to my guns, … well, all youH get of them is the lead part. So, let it alone and tell me how I can get hold of a horse.” And then he looked at Ivan. “And treat the woman decendy.”

Ivan spit toward her and Mary Ann recoiled, as if from the bite of a snake.

“You boys all spread out, hear?” Ivan ordered. The men in the bar, some of them already standing, started to move.

John Rourke didn’t budge.

There were more scavenged weapons, some things that even looked homemade. During the Twentieth Century, a substantial and highly vocal minority had fought unceasingly for what they called “gun control,” really people control instead. Chief among their spurious arguments . was that by some mystical method the denial of availability of firearms to the law-abiding would prevent criminal misuse. A handmade shotgun or zipgun, made from pipe or radio antenna or other available materials, was as deadly as the finest weapon ever made. And anyone could make one, even churls such as these. Guns were never a problem, just a relatively minuscule

percentage of the people who used them.

The bartender had an assault rifle, a wartime AKM-96 of the sort the Russians had used in their fight against Mid-Wake.

John Rourke hadn’t done this sort of thing since that war, when he’d measured his reflex time against equipment in New Germany shortly after this. Awakening, he discovered that his time was slighdy better than it had been before.

“I still need transportation. IH get it. It’s your decision if all or any of you are alive at that time.” “Fuck off!” Ivan shouted back.

John Rourke shook his head. “How sad it is that what little of the English language remaining to you has devolved to this.”

“What the hell he say?” It was the man at the bar.

“Let’s do it, then,” John Rourke urged, not desirous of wasting any more time than he had to here.

Ivan started to draw.

John Rourke saw the muscles in Ivan’s face and neck and around his eyes flex in the split second before the hand moved. So Rourke’s hands were already in motion, the two stainless steel Scoremasters filling his fists and out of his belt, muzzles punching forward, the hammers cocking under his thumbs. The first fingers twitched and the pistols bucked lightly. There was a simultaneous double roar that made his ears ring, and already the guns were firing again.

And Ivan was falling down dead, his eyes wide open in stardement evolving to death, a wartime German service weapon falling from his fingers.

The laughing man at the bar fell in the same instant, his Beretta flying from his hand.

The bartender with the assault rifle slammed back into his motley array of botdes, the rifle discharging into the bar itself, bullets hitting the laughing man in the back, flinging his body forward.

The two men flanking Ivan—one had a homemade pipe shotgun already in his hands and the other was struggling with something inside his clothing that looked like a zipgun—went down, the one with the zipgun jackknifing first, then sprawling sideways over the rising muzzle of a gun in the hands of a man from the next nearest table.

But John Rourke shot him as well.

Someone shouted, “Wait up!” There were three men running for the front door and Rourke let them go.

The last man in the room dove behind his table, and with the Scoremaster in his right hand, Rourke lobbed a solitary round toward him. It was nearly empty, anyway.

Rourke thumbed up the safety, stepping back and left as the man behind the table punched a German service pistol toward him and fired. The man missed, as Rourke had at once anticipated and hoped.

The Metalife Custom 629 Smith was in Rourke’s right hand now. He double actioned it once, the 180-grain jacketed hollow point exiting the .44 Magnum’s six-inch barrel and zipping through the table, into the man. The man’s body slammed back into the hearth, his clothing catching fire as he fell.

John Rourke logged another shot inside the man’s head which was unaccountable.

Rourke turned halfway toward the front doorway, just in case the three men who had fled returned.

Mary Ann knelt speechless beside Ivan’s body, hands clasped over her ears, tears streaming down her dirty cheeks.

He moved toward the last man he’d shot, kicking the body over onto the back to extinguish the flames.

There was a small back door at the far end of the bar which Rourke had noticed earlier. And it opened now.