the neck, the stone axehead locking in the chest cavity, a hideous scream, then a cloud of blood, then the smell of sphincter muscles relaxing, human excrement pouring from between the cannibal’s legs, the head hanging by a thread of flesh, flopping across the right side of the chest cavity as the body fell away.
Rourke let go of the axe handle.
He stood there a moment. The remaining cannibal was unmoving, still on the rocks where Rourke had kicked him repeatedly in the head to put him down. The eyes were open. Rourke assumed death.
He reached down for his weapons—there was gunfire, the short, light bursts from Paul Ruben-stein’s Schmeisser, a familiar sound he hadn’t heard for five hundred years.
Stuffing the Metalifed and Mag-Na-Ported Python into its holster, the CAR-15 and the Gerber in his left fist, Rourke balled his right fist around the Pachmayr gripped butt of the Detonics pistol—Rubenstein needed help. Three shots was the signal he had found something. There was another burst of subgunfire. Much more than three shots—Paul was in trouble.
Rourke was already scanning the far side of the rocks for a way down.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
One moment he had been alone, inspecting what might have been tracks, then the next, sounds of branches breaking, of footfalls. He had wheeled, fired, fired again and again, cutting down at least six of them, falling back as the others regrouped behind low rocks.
He stood beside his machine—there was no need for cover. They were armed only with stone axes. His stomach churned—they had worn human skins for clothing, some of them with the facial hair or the hair from the head still intact, one wearing on the center of his chest what appeared to be a skinned human face—eyelids and lips still evident. v The magazine in the Schmeisser he judged as more than half empty—too startled to count his shots, something he had taught himself to do, something he had made second nature. But the sight of them—he shivered, stabbing the partially spent magazine into his trouser belt, taking a fresh thirty-two round stick for the Schmeisser and ramming it up the well.
Paul Rubenstein shifted the Schmeisser to his left hand for an instant, drawing the battered Browning High Power from the ballistic nylon tanker-style shoulder rig in which he carried it. The pistol in his belt, butt pointing left for access with his left hand, he took the subgun into his right fist again, steadying it with his left, waiting.
Rourke had used the expression once—a drug-store stand.
Both 9mms ready, he was ready.
And the cannibals were coming now, raising from their positions behind the rocks.
He fired a controlled three-round burst from the Schmeisser—but the cannibals didn’t hide, didn’t run, didn’t fall back.
His fists locked to his weapon, he watched it, almost as if it were in slow motion, the cannibals, their stone axes swinging wildly over their heads, running to meet him, screams and shouts he couldn’t understand issuing from their mouths.
He shifted the muzzle of the Schmeisser left, then started to fire, hosing them, cutting them down, stone axes launching toward him as the men who had wielded them fell, but more of the cannibals coming, like a human wave, he thought. He zigzagged the muzzle of the Schmeisser again and again, putting more of them down, more of them still coming.
And the Schmeisser was empty.
Paul Rubenstein let the subgun fall to his side on its sling, no time to reload it, finding the butt of the High Power with his left hand, drawing it from his belt, jacking back the hammer with his left thumb, the chamber already loaded, thrusting the pistol outward, firing once, killing, firing again—a head shot—and the body falling, firing again, a hand loosing a stone axe, the body rolling back and down. Firing again, a stone axe flying skyward, a body spinning out, tumbling to the ground. But some of the cannibals he had already shot, with the subgun, now with the High Power, they were rising—coming. As if they were not perhaps human, as if they were unkillable.
His right hand found the Gerber Mkll fighting knife John had given him. Rubenstein drew the knife, holding it ready in his right fist like a short sword, still firing the High Power, bodies falling as the stone-axe-armed cannibals closed.
There was a shout from behind him. “Paul— hold on!” The roar of a motorcycle engine.
“Natalia,” he whispered, the High Power empty in his left fist, no time to reload, his right hand punching out, burying the Gerber into the chest of one of the cannibals—through the skin of some anonymous dead woman whiclj the cannibal wore—burying the steel up to the hilt.
The High Power—he crashed it down against the forehead of one of them like a skull crasher, the cannibal’s body sagging back. The roar of the bike again as a stone axe swung down toward him and he raised his left arm to block the blow however he could. A burst of automatic weapons fire—an M-16, a sound he knew well. The cannibal holding the axe crumpled, Paul sidestepping as the axe fell toward him without a hand behind it. In an instant he realized that a hand did still grip the axe, but the hand was no longer part of an arm. A scream— Rubenstein had the Gerber free and stabbed it into the chest of the cannibal with the severed hand.
The bike—a blur of motion and color, the blackness of Natalia’s clothes, the bike impacting at the knot of the cannibals surrounding him, bodies flying, screams, more bursts of assault rifle fire as Rubenstein hacked into the human wall closing on him with the blade of the Gerber and the butt of his pistol. More assault rifle fire—then it choked off. “Natalia!” He screamed the word so loudly his throat ached with her name.
The thunder of a heavy caliber revolver, then again and again, bodies peeling back from him.
Natalia was suddenly there, firing her gleaming Metalife Custom L-Frames point blank into faces and torsos, the bodies of the cannibals nearest him falling away.
A clicking sound—her guns were empty, he realized. Then another sound—click, click, click, then a scream. The Bali-Song, the gleaming steel catch-ing the sunlight, flashing across faces and chests and hands and arms, screams of the cannibals.
She was beside him now, and suddenly they were back to back, only their knives—
“John should be getting here,” he heard her pant. A cannibal came at him with a stone axe upraised—no way to block it, he realized.
He started to thrust the Gerber forward.
A sound then—a sound like no other, the flat booming of a .45, again and again and again, bodies peeling back. More of the shots from .45s, rapid succession, then throttled off, then the thunderlike sound of a heavy caliber revolver again—it would be John Rourke’s Python. Ru-benstein sidestepped, stabbing the Gerber into the chest of the stone axe wielder. Natalia spun beside him, hacking with her Bali-Song against flesh, screams, the booming of the Python again and again and again.
Rourke’s face, Rourke’s body shouldering through, a knife in each hand. Natalia screamed,
“We’re winning!”
Rubenstein’s right arm ached as he worked the knife, cutting, hacking, killing until he lost count.
After a long time Paul Rubenstein lowered his knife—because there was no one left to fight. Dead. Departed.
He would have fallen to his knees to rest but there was no spot near him that wasn’t littered with all or part of one of the cannibals. He heard Rourke talking as he closed his eyes. “Only the most fit, the most strong among them would have survived, the very toughest. We’d better get out of here after we check the skins they’re wearing—that one of them isn’t Mi-chael’s.” And Rubenstein shivered but he opened his eyes so he could look for some fragment that would look like John’s face—which was Michael’s face—and he prayed he couldn’t find such a thing, not find it at all. And he reloaded his weapons in case they would come back and there would be more killing to do.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
There had been no one alive to interrogate,
Natalia reflected, realizing at once that the thought was horribly cold-blooded.
But she had interrogated prisoners before—and she hoped she would never again. As she hugged her face against Rourke’s back, the leather of his battered brown bomber jacket rough against her cheek, but good-feeling to her, she wondered almost absently what she would have been like had she never joined the KGB as a young girl fresh from the Polytechnic and fresh from studies of classical ballet.
She had met Karamatsov at the Chicago School in the Soviet Union. It was called the Chicago School, she had always been told, because the type of English taught there, practiced there, used unflinchingly there, was Middle
