Survivalist - The Web Part 4

No-even a living ghost. And I don't want to fight it. I respect John for searching for Sarah. For-" She almost said never touching her. But she couldn't say that because she didn't like to think about it. !

"I mean . . . he's the last of a breed, isn't he? Silent, strong-a man of honor."

"Yes-he's a man of honor," she repeated. The chills in her body from the coldness of Rubenstein's feet were starting to subside. . . .

They had built a fire; there had been no other choice. And behind the windbreak in the glow of the fire, her feet wrapped in the sleeping bag and blankets around her, even covering her head, her ears were finally starting to become warmer.

Paul sat a foot or so away from her, the whiskey bottle beside them, between them. He had taken a long drink from it an hour earlier and then simply sat, watching the fire, silent, his feet wrapped in blankets against the cold.

"She used to do that. I always had problems with my feet freezing up,"

Paul said suddenly.

"Your-"

"My girl-I was afraid you were gonna say my mother. But it was my girl."

"Was she-was she pretty?" Natalia asked, not looking at him, but staring into the fire.

"Yeah-she was pretty. She was," he said with an air of finality.

Natalia felt suddenly awkward, reaching her hand out of the blankets which swathed her, the cold air something she could feel suddenly against her skin. She picked up the bottle-the gla.s.s of it was cold to her touch and cold against her lips as she drank from it, then set it down again. She reached her hand out still farther, found Rubenstein's arm and held it.

"Would you tell me about her?"

"Catharsis?"

"Maybe-and my curiosity. You know that. Women are always curious."

"Ruth was that way," he said quietly.

"Had you-?"

"Known each other a long time? Yeah-went to temple together whenever my dad was on leave when we were kids. Her folks and my folks knew each other."

"You were a military brat weren't you?" Natalia smiled, looking at him in the firelight.

"Yeah-brat period, maybe. But that isn't true. I was always a good kid-relatives, the other officers, always said, 'Paul is such a well-behaved little boy.' Wish I hadn't been. Ruth always said we should wait until we-" He stopped and fell silent.

Natalia didn't know if she should press it, but then decided. "Until you were married?"

He just looked at her, his gla.s.ses, long since back in place, slipping down the bridge of his nose. "You believe that ... I mean, well you know .

. . but this isn't any kind of thing on my part to try to-"

"To make a pa.s.s?" Natalia smiled.

"Yeah-that'd be pretty funny-me making a pa.s.s for you, wouldn't it?" He laughed.

"No-and it wouldn't even be sweet. But it'd be flattering to me." She smiled.

Again he fell silent, taking a pull on the bottle, then settling his forearm under her left hand again. "Here I am-middle of nowhere and I'm a virgin. Just what you want with death around every corner, isn't it?" He laughed.

"You would make any woman a fine lover," Natalia said, feeling awkward saying it.

"h.e.l.l! I knew Ruth for six years before I worked up/the nerve to kiss her." Rubenstein Jaughed. { But the laughter sounded hollow to her, and Natalia said, "How old were you then?"

"Nine." He laughed again, this time the laughter sounded genuine she thought.

(fI me! Vladmir when I was twenty. He was so strong and brave and-I didn't know any better. He made love to me-a lot in those days. I thought it was love anyway."

She moved her hand away, finding the black shoulder bag and starting to search it for her cigarettes. She set her knife down on the ground beside the bag.

"What'd you call that knife again?" Rubenstein asked, obviously changing the subject. "What was it?"

"A Bali-Song knife-it's a Philippine design, though it may have originated with an American sailor who brought it there. Some of the really big ones were used as cane knives and as weapons, too. It's a martial-arts fighting knife. I got into martial-arts weapons when I was just-"

She put the knife down, looking at Paul. "Why don't you ask-did I ever really love Vladmir?"

She lit a cigarette, waiting for him to ask her.

"Did you?' he finally said, his voice sounding suddenly older to her.

"Yes-until I found out what he was. And I was trying to deal with that and I saw John again there and-" She swallowed hard, forgetting about the cigarette a moment, then choking on the smoke and coughing.

"John was everything you'd thought Vladimir was- but really wasn't. I mean, the grammar or syntax or whatever-well it really sucks, but isn't that what you want to Of > say: Natalia swallowed again, this time without the smoke-instead the bottle in her left hand, the whiskey burning at her throat suddenly. "Yes-I wanted to say that. Men always jokingly say women are like children, call them girls-but we are. We all look for our own personal knight-you know, the kind with a rK-N-I-' We look for someone we hook our dreams on. That's what Ruth saw in you-and she wasn't wrong."

"Me-a knight?" Rubenstein laughed.

"A knight doesn't have to be tall and brave-but you are brave, you just maybe didn't know it then. It's inside. That's what it is." She reached her hand out and felt Rubenstein's hand touching hers. "That's what it is," she repeated.

Nehemiah Rozhdestvenskiy thought the idea was, in a way, amusing. He looked at his gun-a nickel-plated Colt single-action Army . with a four-and-three-quarter-inch barrel. He was the conqueror, the invader, and/his sidearm was "The Gun That Won the West'-as American as-he verbalized it, "Apple pie-ha!"

He c.o.c.ked the hammer back to the loading notch, opened the loading gate, and spun the cylinder-five rounds, originally round-nosed lead solids, but the bullets drilled out three sixty-fourths of an inch with a one-sixteenth-inch drill bit, then tipped into candle wax after first having had an infinitesimal amount of powdered gla.s.s shavings inserted into their cavities. His own special load.

After rotating the cylinder, closing the gate, and lowering the hammer over the empty chamber, he holstered the gun inside his waistband, in a small holster he'd had custom-made of alligator skin, the gun with -ivory b.u.t.t forward and slightly behind his left hip bone. He reached to the dresser top, picking up the set of military brushes and working his hair with them. Thirty-four years old and not a speck of gray, he thought.

He set down the brushes and walked across the room to his closet; the clothes were neatly arranged there by his valet. He took down a tweed sportcoat-woolen and finely tailored to his exact measurements. He held it for a moment against the charcoal gra> slacks he wore. The herringbone pattern had a definite charcoal gray shading and it made for a perfect combination.

He slipped the coat on. It would be cold, dangerous because of the storm-but it was vital and no choice was left other than to go.

He tried to think if there was some American song about West Virginia-his destination. He thought for a moment, then decided there doubtless was but he didn't know it. Instead he whistled "Dixie"-it was close enough for his purposes.

He stopped whistling as he reached the door of his quarters, laughing.

"Whistling 'Dixie' in a snowstorm-ha!"

He started through the doorway, into the hall. . . .

The wind at the restored Lake Front airport was bit-ingly cold, and he pulled up on the collar of his coat- wolfs fur-as he started toward the helicopter for the first leg of his journey toward West Virginia and the presidential retreat-and the duplicate set of files on the American Eden Project.

As he crossed under the rotor blades, he could feel it- his hair was ruined.

Darkness had fallen deeply-he glanced at the black luminous face of the Rolex Submariner he wore-more than an hour ago. Rourke exhaled, watching the steam $n his breath. The Harley's engine rumbled between his legs, running a little roughly with the cold.

A smile crossed his lips; he had been right. He was heading into the heart of the storm, Natalia and Paul away from it. He looked behind him once, into the white swirling darkness, then gunned the Hariey, slowly starting ahead, the snow making the road almost impa.s.sable. . . .

Rourke had stopped a little while earlier to pull up the neck of his crew-neck sweater so that it covered most of his face, and his ears and head. There had been a sudden coldness near the small of his back where his sweater no longer protected him, and his ears had been stiffening with the cold. Now as he pressed the bike along a mountain curve, the visibility was bad, worse than it had been before. The storm only seemed to intensify as he moved along, and the cold increased. He wore his dark-lensed aviator-style sungla.s.ses, to protect his eyes from the driving ice spicules; the backs of his gloved hands were i encrusted with the ice where his fists locked over the handlebars.

Brus.h.i.+ng the ice away from the cuff of his sweater where it extended past his brown leather jacket's cuff, he moved his right hand to roll back the sweater and read the face of his watch. It was early in the evening, and the temperature would still drop for another nine or ten hours or so until just before dawn. As he s.h.i.+fted his right hand back to the handlebars, his weight s.h.i.+fted- stiffness from the cold-and the bike started into a skid.

He was doing barely twenty by the speedometer, the headlight of the Harley dancing wildly across the snow and ice as he took the curve, the Harley almost out of control. His hands wrestled the controls, trying to steer 'the bike out of the skid. His feet dragged to stop it, to balance it.

He let the bike skid out, jumping clear of it, the machine sliding across the road surface as he rolled. The Harley stopped in a s...o...b..nk to the far right of the road; Rourke landed flat on his stomach on the ice and snow.

He looked up, shaking his head to clear it.

He pushed himself up with his hands, slowly rising to his feet, pulling off his right glove, clutching the wrist hole tight in his left fist to retain the warmth inside. Then, with his right hand, he took off the gla.s.ses that had protected his eyes. He realized also that he was tired, fast approaching exhaustion; and with the cold, that could be fatal. He moved slowly, carefully toward his bike. It was in a s...o...b..nk, the snow having cus.h.i.+oned its impact. It appeared totally undamaged.

"Lucky," he murmured. He reached down and shut off the key, putting the gla.s.ses into an inside pocket of the jacket first. Squinting against the ice, he looked around him; he needed shelter. To his left-to the east-the clouds had a strange glow. Radiation? He shook his head, dismissing the thought. He could be dying at this very instant, he realized, if the snow that fell on him was irradiated. He would worry about that later.

But there was a subtle glow and trails of fire were visible; and as the cloud patterns s.h.i.+fted in the wind, the glow remained, as if it emanated from the ground.

If things had been normal, he would have labeled the glow as the lights from-he verbalized it-"A town-a town. A town." It looked to be about two or three miles away, but he realized that with the darkness and the snow and the cloud layers the distance judgment he made could have been self-deceptive. , He gloved his right hand again, working his fingerfs which were already stiffening.

There were two possibilities: to fabricate a shelter which would give marginal protection from the wind and no protection from the cold, or to go to the source of the lights. He had pa.s.sed a side road turnoff a half-mile back; it likely led toward the source of the lights. The general direction seemed the same, although mountain roads, winding like Christmas ribbons across the landscape and really leading nowhere, could be deceptive as to direction. But along such a road there would be farms, homes-he decided.

His best chance for shelter was along the side road, though the snow would be heavier there.

He wrest/ed the Harley up, straddling it, starting it, the engine rumbling; his gas gauge was low, very low. Rourke fought the machine back out of the snowdrift and arced it around. If he kept the speed low enough . . .

When more Brigands had started arriving-some sort of conclave she wondered?-she had awakened the children; then as silently as possible, she led them and the horses down on the far side of the rise-away from the Brigand camp, into the mounting storm. As Sarah rode Tildie now, the horse's body white-coated with the snow and ice, she wondered if it had been a wise decision-the right one? What would John have done? Would he have-?

"Mommie?"

She shook her head, smiling as she turned around. "What is it, Annie? Are you cold?"

"No-I'm letting her hug me-she isn't-"

"I am cold," Annie interrupted Michael. "I'm cold. I'm cold."

"Slow up, Michael," Sarah told her son, wanting him to rein in Sam.

Michael didn't argue; she guessed he was cold, too. "Here." She reined Tildie around, then came up beside her children. She took the blanket which she had wrapped around her and put it around Annie's shoulders, wrapping her and Michael in it, pinning the blanket with her shaking hands across Michael's chest.

"But now you're gonna be cold, Mom," Michael protested.

"No. I won't lie and say I was too warm before, but I'll be fine. That should be better now," she said, turning to Annie. She stuffed her hands back into her gloves. She knew it wouldn't really be better; blankets only served to retain body warmth, not promote it, and both of the children were rapidly losing theirs. Again she wished for John to be there. He was a doctor, and among other things an expert on cold-weather survival.

She urged Tildie forward, telling Michael, "Stay here a minute. I'm going up that rise to see where we are^ maybe."

f "We can come," Michael insisted.

"AH right-but stay well behind me-no sense wearing out Sam more than you have to."

She rode toward a tall stand of pines, the modified AR- across her saddle, cold against her thighs. If a Brigand conclave was on, then there would be Brigands traveling through the area, toward it.

Urging Tildie up the rise with her knees, her left hand holding the reins, she clutched the AR- pistol grip in her gloved right fist. "Come on, Tildie-just a little while longer," she cooed. Sarah glanced behind her once- Michael and Annie were coming, slowly, as she wanted them to.

Michael, like his father, stubborn, arrogant, but reliable-a man she could count on more than he knew.

She was tempted to call out to the children, telling Michael to save Sam the haul up the rise, but she didn't, lest there be Brigands nearby she couldn't see.

Her eyelashes were encrusted with ice, the sleet and snow blowing against her face. She reached the top of the rise, reining Tildie back. "Whoa-easy," she cooed again.

Beyond the rise was the Savannah River and suddenly, she knew where she was. Lake Hart well would be nearby-in the distance, she could see the Hartwell dam. John had taken her there once with the children for a tour of the dam structure, and several times she had gone to the lake itself with John and the children-swimming.

The thought of plunging her body into water now chilled her. She trembled, then trembled again, remembering John's hands on her once as they'd lain by the lake, their bodies wet and mostly naked, the children splas.h.i.+ng in the water at its edge.

She turned to call out to Michael that everything was all right. Tildie reared; Sarah was thrown back in the stock saddle, a gunshot punching into the snow by the animal's front hoofs.

Sarah glanced to her right. Out of the pines were coming men and women, ragged, running, snow-covered, rifles and handguns in their hands, curses coming from their lips-and threats.

"s.h.i.+t!" she screamed, wheeling Tildie, fighting -tc control the animal, and swinging the rifle up as she reined the horse under her. Her stiff-with-the-cold righl thumb worked the selector to full auto position; her first finger twitched against the trigger. A short burst fired across her saddle; flowers of red blotched the ice-encrusted chest of the lead man. The man lunged toward her and the horse, an ax in his hands. They weren't Brigands; they were starving men and women, people who-she fired again, at another man starting to fire a shotgun. Sarah shot him in the face and neck, then screamed, "Michael-get Sam going. Get Annie out of here!"

Sarah dug her heels into the frightened horse she rode; Tildie leaped ahead, back down the rise. A woman was lunging for her, out of the trees, a knife in bony hands held like a stake that was to be driven into someone's heart. Sarah pumped the AR-'s trigger again. The woman's body rocked back, spinning, then falling, a ragged line of red across the threadbare clothes covering her body.

She knew what they wanted now-the horse for food, the weapons for defense, her life and the children's lives/ "Michael-get out of here," she shouted again, kneeing Tildie onward.

The pine boughs to her left shuddered, and in the darkness against the whiteness of the snow, she could see a man coming out of the trees, running toward her. She recognized what he had in his right hand-a machete.

He threw himself toward Tildie, into the animal's path. Tildie rearing under her, Sarah reined up, as the machete sliced toward Tildie's neck.

The reins came away in Sarah's hands. She reeled back as the man sliced his blade again. Her left hand, still clutching at the useless reins, reached downward, s.n.a.t.c.hing at Tildie's bridle. Sarah kneed the animal.

"Come on, girl!"

Tildie leaped forward. The man hacked with his machete, but fell aside at the impact of the animal. Then he was on his feet and running after her as Sarah glanced back. She loosed the bridle, s.n.a.t.c.hing at a generous handful of flowing ice-encrusted mane, and digging her heels into the bay mare's sides, coaching her. "Up, Tildie-up, girl.' The animal responded, charging ahead and down the rise.

Ahead of her now, she could see Michael's horse, Michael and Annie aboard it. The thought suddenly startled her-Michael's horse. It was John's horse. Two figures wrestled against the front of the animal, reaching for the reins. Michael edged the animal back from them. She saw something flash against the snow, heard a scream; Michael had a knife. Where had he gotten it?

One of the two figures fell away, the second dove toward the two children in the saddle.

Sarah hauled back on Tildie's mane, the animal slowing, skidding along the snow on its haunches. Sarah's right hand brought the rifle up to her shoulder, her finger reached for the trigger. "Help my aim, G.o.d," she breathed, twitching the trigger as Tildie settled; the man, reaching for Michael and Annie, spun, fell.

"Get going, Michael!" Sarah screamed. Sam spurred ahead as she saw Michael kicking at him with his heels. Sarah dug in her knees, and Tildje started after him.

There was a burst of gunfire from behind her now, and Tildie started to slip on a patch of ice beneath her. Sarah felt the animal going down, perhaps wounded; she threw herself free of the animal's bulk, into the snow. Her back ached as she impacted, the rifle skittering across the ice, back toward Tildie.