Western urban English, the most accent-free. She had learned the advanced techniques of her then-new craft there. And she had met Vladmir Karamatsov there, the experienced field agent, the senior officer, the hero who daily had braved the hateful Americans in his fight to preserve the people of the Soviet Union. After marrying him, she had learned that he was a lie, and that so much of what she had been taught in school, so much of what she had been taught in the various levels of her KGB training had been a lie.
And John Rourke, the man whose body she hugged herself to as the Harley vibrated beneath them, speeding across the bumpy and rocky trails through the mountains—John, at her uncle’s urging, had killed Vladmir after Vladmir had nearly killed her in a fit of rage, violated her humanity to the point where she had fought him in order to survive.
And she had fallen in love. With John Rourke. And now his wife seemed to despise him, or at least his actions, and the action had been for her, she realized. He could say he had planned for the survival of the race, that six adults, three mating pairs would be far greater guarantee of survival than only one. He could explain the logic. When he and Sarah someday died, the children would have been perhaps faced with incest or the extinction of the human race. And he would not have two wives—it was not his way. And Paul—Rourke had wanted to provide for Paul’s happiness as well. Rourke had allowed his children to age to adulthood.
And now, with only the most fragmentary clue, they searched for Rourke’s son.
For Michael.
John had theorized that Michael, having en-countered the cannibals, would have pursued the cannibals rather than the mysterious light he had seen in the sky, and so they had left the due northwesterly course they had followed ever since leaving the Retreat, backtracking the cannibal’s movements by their hideous trails of cookfires and human bones.
That they ate their own weakened or sick was obvious, but where had they come from? They could not have survived on the surface after the sky had taken flame. Where?
She shuddered—less from the wind of the slip stream than from the fear they would find out.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
They had found tracks of Michael’s bike, then lost them again, doubling back. Dismounted, they stood now just inside the treeline, Rubenstein pulling away the withered brush. “It’s the bike you took from the Brigands after they attacked the airplane, John.”
Rourke looked at the younger man, then back to the blue Harley Davidson Low Rider.
“Check her to see if she’ll run—that gives us a bike for each of us until we find him.”
“Why would he have gone on foot?” Natalia asked. Rourke looked at her—really seeing her for the first time in days, the surreal blueness of her eyes, the near blackness of her hair, the thing intangible inside her that made it so obvious to him that she loved him. “Michael would have been getting close to something—maybe a concentration ol the cannibals that he’d followed. The engine noise would have frightened them off and apparently he wanted to observe them. So he left the bike. No pack, no other gear. Either he got in trouble and couldn’t get back for it or he’s still following them close.” “Then what should we do, John—if he’s that close to them maybe?
What about our bikes?”
Rourke glanced to Rubenstein for a moment, then back to Natalia. “There’d be a several day lead on us most likely—if we start getting close to something, we’ll play it by ear. But on foot we’d be forced to travel too slowly. We can cover in an hour more territory than he could have covered in a day. We could find him by morning, maybe,” and Rourke looked skyward, the sunvlow, yellow-orange on the horizon.
“We can go on in the dark for a time at least,” Natalia announced.
Rourke only nodded.
His eyes were searching the ground and he moved now back from the bike and toward the partial clearing beyond the trees. It was guesswork only, he realized—no footprints would be visible on the hard ground. And the snow that had come and gone so quickly would have helped further to eradicate them. He wondered absently if it would snow for Christmas? Would he be home for Christmas?
Did he really have a home?
And he looked up from his search of the ground for a footprint he knew would not be there, feeling Natalia’s hand at his shoulder. And he saw in her eyes what he had thought he no longer had.
Chapter Forty
The lights had been off when he had awakened, the room as dark as a starless and moonless night, but he had felt her beside him in the darkness, heard her whispered murmurings, her tears that they would each soon be one who goes. And he had tried, not yet able to move, to explain death to her as he understood it. And that her understanding of her religion was not all as it should be. And he had held her—and she had cried again that if she carried his baby inside her that it too would die and Michael Rourke had not known what to say to her. It had been hours by the luminous black face of his Rolex—their only light in the darkened room—before he had felt he could move suf-ficiently well. But he had unbuttoned the front of the dress she wore—she had told him it was gray and a worker’s uniform, hours before he had touched his hands to her flesh, his right hand paining him but the softness of her body making the pain less something of which he was aware.
He had slipped between her legs, to do again what they had done before—how long ago?
Only a night.
Her body had moved with him, beneath him, surrounding him, and she had shuddered against him as he had shuddered against her. The clinical side of him reflected upon something he had read about the possibilities of simultaneous orgasm. But they had felt it together and that, he knew inside himself, was what had mattered.
He was his father’s son, he knew, but in the darkness there holding Madison’s burning warmth close against him, he realized he was not his father. What little remembrances of his father’s relationship with his mother were remaining to him—it seemed somehow different. And perhaps he carried in him some of his mother as well, the emotions which he remembered. Tears, smiles, gentle songs in the night.
Michael Rourke smiled. He had discovered himself—he wondered if most people discovered themselves too late as had he.
There was still the knife—still the little knife in his sock. He could pick the knife up from inside his emptied boot where it was now, use the knife when they came for them at dawn. He assumed it would be dawn, no desire to ask Madison, to make her remember.
He could kill some of them, with the knife, with the martial arts skills his father had taught him, kill some of them and before they got him, kill Madison, to spare her the torment of being skinned alive by the cannibals, to spare her that.
Michael held her more closely. One thing his father had taught him well—to never give up.
And very suddenly too, as he now felt he understood himself, he felt that he understood his father’s torment—the woman Natalia. If there were anything to forgive his father, he forgave it.
Life was to be lived. Michael touched his lips to
Madison’s forehead, felt her stir against him, felt her hands searching for his face, her lips finding his. To be lived, he thought—as long as it could be.
Chapter Forty-One
He had decided to wait—they were not bound, merely blindfolded. There had been no ropes in evidence, no manacles—only the prods and the admonition not to try to escape.
He could feel the shifting in temperatures as they moved, hear sounds he recognized from having read of them—an air lock. The Place was hermetically sealed—it was how it had survived the holocaust. But the price for survival had been too high.
A second door opened and he was urged through with the prods, but they were not activated.
Voices—he had counted six as, blindfolded, they had first been led into the corridor.
Six men—he could kill six men, then perhaps escape with Madison into the hills beyond the Place. He could fight off the cannibals again. “Wait here,” one of the voices from the blackness called.
A clicking sound.
Madison had told him before the business-suited men had come for them. There were shackles built into the wall where she had been left for the ones she called Them. He had seen them when entering. The shackles required no key but needed to be opened with two hands and the shackles were so placed as to keep the victim spread- eagled against the wall.
It would be in the farthest reach of the cave, nearest the mouth, he knew—he could feel the. coolness of the
