and—'
'We won't do anything.'
Rourke lit one of his small, dark tobacco cigars—he was running low on those and would have to restock at the Retreat. 'What was your cottage industry?'
'Fireworks.' She smiled.
He felt strange—perhaps at the realization of what she was telling him.
'You're not—'
.
'When strangers came in after the Night of the War, we asked them to stay.
Some of them decided to join us. The rest of them are being taken care of—and they'll be released. That's why the police have gone to twelve-hour shifts.'
'When'll they be released?'
'Christmas was always our favorite holiday here, the reunion of family and friends. It's—'
Rourke hammered his hands palm downward onto her desk, then glanced over his shoulder toward the library behind him through the glass partition; it was dark, empty. He looked at his watch. It was after five. His vision was blurring.
'I wanted you to stay.'
Rourke stood up, suddenly feeling strange, lurching half across the desk.
'Coffee,' he murmured.
'We have the entire valley mined with explosives. And the night after tomorrow night, there'll be a fireworks display and then all of us ...
we'll—'
Rourke fell across the desk, cursing his stupidity. He looked up at her.
'Mass—'
'Suicide.' She smiled, finishing his thought. 'All two thousand three hundred forty-eight people in the town. That's why no one minded the lie, John. When I called you Abe.' Rourke was having trouble hearing her, seeing her. He snatched for one of his Detonics pistols, but she held his wrist and he could not move his arm. 'I was the only one who didn't have a family. My husband is dead. We had no children—there wasn't ever the time—the time to have children. But now I won't die alone, John.'
He started to talk, his tongue feeling thick, unresponsive.
'I helped my husband in the clinic. I know how to use his drugs. You won't be able to do a thing, John— until it's too late, and then you can die with me, John.'
She was stroking his head, smiling, and he felt her bend over to him and kiss his cheek. 'It'll be all right, John; this is the better way. We'll all die and it will always be the same—normal, like it used to be.'
Rourke tried to move his mouth to speak; he couldn't.
It was heavy rain now, cold but not freezing, dripping down inside the collar of his permanently borrowed &#;Army field jacket, his hair too wet to bother with pulling up the hood. His gloves were sodden. The Schmeisser was wrapped in a ground cloth and the Browning High Power was under his jacket. His boots were wet, the Harley having splashed through inches-deep puddles in the road surface, and the going was slow to avoid a big splash that could drown the engine.
He squinted through his rain-smeared glasses— Kentucky. He was entering Kentucky.
Paul Rubenstein wondered two things: would he ever see Natalia again now that she was safe with Russian troops, and had Rourke made it through the storm to find Sarah and the children yet?
Natalia had told the Russian commander that he, Rubenstein, was a Soviet spy who had been escorting her through American territory because he posed as one and was known to the Resistance people operating the area, thought to be one of them. His stomach churning as he'd done it, Rubenstein had agreed, backed up her story. Nat alia V credentials checked; he had been released.
They had shaken hands only, but she had blown him a kiss by .pursing her lips as they had spoken a few yards from the Soviet troops. Then he had boarded his machine and started back into the storm.
He had looked at her over his shoulder once; she hadn't waved, but he'd felt she would have if she could have.
And John—that Rourke had gotten through the storm at all wasn't something over which Rubenstein worried— Rourke was all but invincible, unstoppable.
But, as he released the handlebar a moment to push his glasses up from the bridge of his nose, Rubenstein wondered—had John Rourke found them yet?
Tildie had wandered ashore minutes after Sarah had taken Michael out of the water; Annie had been the first to spot her. The animal was visibly shuddering.
Sarah had built a fire by the shoreline in the shelter of some rocks and a red clay embankment; then having done what she could to warm the children, she had mounted Tildie—feeling the only way to warm the animal was to exercise her, then rub her down. Promising to keep them in sight, Sarah had started along the water's edge perhaps twenty feet above the shoreline, the wind of the slipstream around her and the animal, chilling her to the bone, but the animal responding.
Sarah clutched the patched-together reins, leaning into Tildie's mane to let the animal break the wind for her. The air temperature was cold, but vastly warmer than it had been. In her heart, she knew the reason why she rode—to think; and she had another reason as well, to search for Sam, her husband's horse, her son's horse. Tildie couldn't carry Michael, Annie, and herself for very long.
