'Friends,' he whispered under his breath. Sarah, his wife, had always been his friend— perhaps that was why they had argued so much before the War, wasting hours they hadn't bothered to tally. Natalia— his most curious friend, he thought. He remembered their meeting in Texas that had led to Rourke's having a final showdown with her KGB husband, killing him. Rourke realized she probably hated him now. The one friend was Paul Rubenstein.
'I'll help you,' Rourke whispered to the girl, her head against his chest and her sobbing subsiding now.
'We can take the ferry boat downriver. I think I can find a contact in Army Intelligence in Savannah. We can do something to try to get some of the people out before it happens. I don't really know how much we can do, how many people can be evacuated— however it's done. But you and your colleagues were right,' he told her. 'Something has to be done. And I guess now it's up to both of us.'
The girl looked up at him, her green eyes still wet with tears, her face paler than it should have been. Rourke decided it was the loss of blood, the shock of the bullet wounds she'd sustained. He wondered how his own face looked. But it was a decision he had to make, he realized. The immediate search for Sarah, Michael, and Ann— his family. Perhaps Paul was like a brother he'd never had, Rourke thought, smiling, amused at himself. He remembered Sarah once telling him that it was cold-blooded to plan for survival if most of your fellow men could not survive. Their perennial argument over his preparation for disaster and her optimism concerning world peace had been forever resolved on the Night of the War when bitter reality had proven his case. But the one thing he'd never been able to make her understand was that he had no illusions that survival alone would be survival. It was the enlightened self-interest of love that made him search for Sarah and his two children, Rourke realized. And it was the
'selfishness' of friendship that compelled him now to find Paul Rubenstein. Rourke had buried his father years earlier, his mother not long after that. If the Night of the War had taught him anything, Rourke thought, it was that a human life was too precious not to fight for.
Chapter 4
Sarah Rourke rested her hands on the saddle horn. Tildie's head dipped down as the horse browsed at a patch of grass. Sarah's eyes scanned the valley beneath the low hill on which they'd stopped. She looked behind her. Michael sat easily in the saddle of her husband's big off-white horse, Sam. She smiled at little Annie, the girl waving to her. Shaking her head, almost not believing the children could have endured what they had, she studied her hands. The nails were trimmed short and there was dirt under them. She had always kept her nails long, even with the farm, the children, the horses, her illustrating. At least the nails on her left hand had been nearly perfect, she thought, smiling. She looked at the gold wedding band, wondering if somewhere still in the world its mate was on a living hand like her own. She cooed to the horse under her as it started to move, raising both her hands to the nape of her neck to retie the blue and white bandanna over her hair. Was John Rourke actually alive? she wondered.
Mary Mulliner's farm, she remembered. She could have stayed there, forever if she had wanted to, the children having an island of normality in the world or what was left of it. But she had packed the saddlebags, the dufflebag, cleaned the assault rifle she'd taken from one of the men who'd tried to rape and kill her. She'd gotten Mary's red-headed son to show her how to
'field strip'— that was what he had called it— the rifle and her husband's Colt .45 automatic. She'd saddled her own horse that morning. Annie had cried, and Michael had talked of how he would take care of Annie, and his mother as well. It was summer now, though by the weather she realized she would have never guessed that. Turning and looking at her two children, she murmured, 'Michael will be seven.' She shook her head in disbelief. Six years old and he had killed a man to save her life; six years old and the boy had saved her life again after she'd drunk contaminated water. The corners of her gray-green eyes crinkled with a smile— the resemblance between Michael and his father wasn't just physical. She studied the boy's face, the dark eyes, the thick, dark hair. The forehead was lower; but Michael was still a boy, she reminded herself. The shoulders, the leanness about him. But it was the strength the boy seemed to have inside of him that at once heartened and sometimes terrified her. He was John all over— loving, analytical, practical, yet a dreamer too. It had taken the War, she realized, to understand that John Rourke's preoccupation with survivalism had not been nightmarish, but a dream for going on when civilization itself failed. She smiled again. She could no more see the War or its aftermath killing her husband John than it had killed Michael— and Michael was here, with her now.
'Michael,' she said, looking at the boy with a smile on her lips.
He smiled back at her, saying, 'Why are you smiling like that?'
'I love you.' She looked over at Annie. 'And I love you, too.'
'We know that,' the boy said, starting to laugh.
'I know you know,' she laughed. Then she pulled up on Tildie's reins and said over her shoulder to the children, 'Come on kids—'
She stopped, reining in, the internal terror gripping at her again, thinking, 'Come on—
where?' Shaking her head, she let out on the reins, moving her knees against Tildie's warm flanks again. 'Come on,' she said aloud, starting the mare down into the valley.
They rode in relative quiet for more than an hour as she judged it by the sun still far to the east. After she had left the Mulliner farm she had tried heading into Georgia. But there had been Brigands, too many of them, she'd thought, to wait it out or skirt around them. She had made the decision then to turn East into the Carolinas, trying to reenter Georgia as she judged she had almost two days ago, nearer the Atlantic Coast. She had convinced herself that perhaps Savannah still existed as an entity, too important as a seaport to bomb from existence. She reined in on Tildie again, staring now across the low valley, then back behind her into the hills. Before the War, she thought, the sound of an automobile or truck engine had been familiar, sometimes comforting. She had liked it when someone had stopped by the farm unexpectedly— at least most of the time. There would be the rumbling, humming noise, and she would look out the window of her studio or through the kitchen windows and see a familiar vehicle pulling up the driveway. Since the War the sound of engines had meant only one thing to her— Brigands.
'Children!' she almost shrieked. 'Hurry up!' She kicked her heels into Tildie's sides, bending around in the saddle, watching Michael as he dropped low over his horse's neck, and Annie as she slapped her tiny hands against her horse's rump. The two children moved their mounts ahead. 'Hurry,' she called again, her right hand moving from Tildie's mane to the butt of her husband's Government Model .45 jammed in the waistband of her faded Levis. In the valley where they rode, they were in the open, exposed.
She could pinpoint the source of the sound now, just over the hills leading down into the valley. The only shelter up ahead was a farmhouse. 'Over there!' she finally shouted, wishing the children could make their animals move more quickly, wishing she hadn't let Annie try riding by herself. The girl wasn't yet five, wouldn't be for four more months. 'Come on, children,' she said again, staring back toward the hills, the engine sounds getting louder, more well defined. Trucks, many of them— and there was another sort of sound. She had ridden with John on his motorcycle, she had heard motorcycles ever since the War, and she heard them now.
'Brigands,' she almost screamed to the children. 'Hurry! For God's sake—' And under her breath as she drew in on the reins, Tildie backing up a step, the children almost even with her now, Sarah whispered, 'For our sake!'
