Rourke sat behind the wheel of the pickup truck, the windows barely cracked open for air, the rain driving down with almost unbelievable force. Rain still dripped from his hair, and the girl beside him and Rubenstein on the far passenger side were wet as well. The brigand force would be moving out and now Rourke, Rubenstein and Natalie were a part of it. One of the brigand outriders had returned in the aftermath of the gunfight. The paramils were now closer than Rourke or any of the brigands had thought them to be, and it was imperative now that the brigands head to safety and put as much distance as possible between themselves and the paramils while they found a secure site for the battle lines to be drawn.
The brigand leader, Mike, had rejected Rourke's offer to stitch his lower lip and stem the flow of blood. Rourke had shrugged and turned and walked back into the truck. Rourke had watched then, as eventually some of Deke's comrades had dragged his body from the mud. He'd watched too, as the townspeople were released. Wet, dirty, bedraggled and terrified, they had slunk past the pickup truck, some turning and quickly eyeing Rourke, then all of them starting to run as they'd headed out of the circle of trucks—alive. But Rourke had wondered if they were really better off now—the new world that had taken shape after the night of the war was a violent one, and Rourke knew that many of them would not survive. Some would die because they could not cope with the violence, some would perhaps eventually revel in it and become brigands themselves. Silently, he'd wondered how his own wife and two children were faring—were they even still alive? He felt the pressure of Natalie's hand on his and stared out into the rain…
By evening, the rain was still falling and the weather had turned cold. Twice during the afternoon, one of the massive fuel tanker trucks had stopped and some of the bikes had refueled. Rourke had counted one, possibly two trucks loaded with gasoline and at least three trucks loaded with Diesel, he guessed—enough to keep the brigand army rolling for prolonged periods away from the remains of civilization. During the middle of the afternoon, one of the few brigand outriders brave enough to keep to his bike in the driving rain had pulled alongside Rourke in the pickup truck and shouted up that Mike, the brigand leader, had changed his mind on the stitches. Rourke had pulled off along the shoulder and passed the bulk of the truck caravan and then pulled alongside Mike's truck. The caravan had stopped then and Rourke, using improvised materials, had stitched together the lip. There was no anesthesia available, and Mike just consumed more of the whiskey he had been drinking ever since the fight in order to control his pain. The inside of the eighteen-wheeler trailer was fitted with a collection of sofas and reclining chairs and beds—things obviously stolen from all the towns along their route. And the walls of the eighteen wheeler were lined with weapons as well. If the other trucks were anything like the one Mike occupied, Rourke decided, the brigand force would decidedly defeat the paramils when the eventual confrontation came.
Rourke had asked the woman attending Mike— apparently his wife or mistress—what was the convoy's destination, and she'd confided that it was a massive plateau some fifty or sixty miles further out into the desert, with one road leading up only, defendable against almost any size army without air support—or at least Mike believed that. As Rourke finished the stitching and told the woman how to make Mike more comfortable, then started to leave, the woman had stopped him, saying, 'Hey—whatever your name is.'
'John Rourke,' he'd told her.
'Well—John Rourke—listen. You did my man a good turn so I'll do you one—there's a kind of rule around here—any snatch that ain't claimed at night is open property for anyone in the camp. So you or the little guy had better be sleepin'
with that chick you brought in with you, or you're gonna have a fight on your hands. There's almost twice as many guys as there's women around for 'em. You get what I mean?'
Rourke nodded, asking, 'How'd you get teamed up with Mike over there?' He looked over her shoulder and saw the brigand leader dozing now in an alcoholic stupor.
'They hit my town, two nights after the war— weren't many of 'em then. Killed my ma and pa and said he'd kill me if I didn't treat him good. So I treated him good—we're kinda attached now, see,' the woman told him.
Rourke said, 'Doesn't it bother you how you got that way?'
'He coulda killed me too, I figure—so I owe him something.'
Rourke looked hard at the woman, saying, his voice a whisper, 'Yeah—and you know what you owe him, too, I think—right at the back of your mind somewhere. One of those bayonets over there in his kidney. Think about it. How old are you, anyway?'
'Seventeen,' she said.
'You look at yourself in a mirror lately?' Rourke turned and walked to the partially open back door of the truck. The rain was streaming in, the floor boards were wet. Rourke had jumped down to the mud and snapped his coat collar up, then started back to the truck.
The drive had gone on then, and now as they slowly pulled into a circle for the evening camp, the rain heavier even than during the day, Rourke stared out into the darkness beyond his headlights. It had been hard to judge the height of the plateau, but the crude road leading up to it had been steep and narrow, and if Mike's woman had been right, the brigand leader's estimate of the defensive posture he would now have hadn't been off. All that needed defending was the narrow road itself, and a half-dozen well-armed men could have held the road against twenty times that number of equally well-armed attackers.
Soon, lights could be seen burning in some of the eighteen-wheelers' trailers, while others from the brigand group were erecting a variety of lean-tos and shelters on the lee side of the trailers to get as much protection as possible from the rain.
'What do we do now?' Rubenstein asked.
'Well, we can't sleep and cook and everything inside the cab here,' Rourke said.
'You and I take some of those ground clothes we've been using and run a canopy out from the rear bed of the truck—we can sleep maybe in the truck bed. After we cover the bikes and everything it should be pretty dry back there.' Then turning to the girl, Rourke said, 'And you can keep an eye peeled while Rubenstein and I get the shelter up—huh? And stay dry.'
'I can do my share of the work,' she said angrily.
'I know you can,' Rourke said softly. 'But you're not going to.' He piled out of the truck cab then and closed his leather jacket against the rain, his CAR-15
and Python still in the cab with the girl. The mud had washed off his clothes and boots from his previous sorties throughout the day into the driving rainstorm, and as he moved through the mud now beside the truck bed, he could feel his feet sinking into it, feel the rain soaking through his damp Levis and running down inside his collar.
