his right hip, looking at Natalie. "Yeah—they're down there, all right. And I
make it the paramils aren't far behind us—I think it's now or never."
"How about never?" Rubenstein said through the open passenger side window,
forcing a smile.
"He's right—Rourke is," Natalie volunteered. "We're better off with the brigands
than caught between them and the paramils."
"Let's go down then and introduce ourselves," Rourke said softly, starting back
around the front of the pickup and climbing into the driver's seat. He gunned
the engine to life, out of years of habit looked over his left shoulder to see
if there was traffic—there wouldn't be, he realized rationally—and edged out
onto the highway.
Rourke reached down to his waist and tried unbuckling the gunbelt, then turned
and looked at the girl, feeling her right hand crossing his abdomen and seeing
her turn awkwardly in the seat between himself and Rubenstein. She undid the
buckle and he leaned forward in the seat and she slipped the belt from around
his waist. "You want me armed again?" she asked.
"Yeah—might be advisable," Rourke answered. "You seemed to do pretty well with
that Python the last time—no sense messing with success."
The girl rebuckled the Ranger Leather Belt and slung it diagonally across her
body, the holster with the six-inch Metalifed .357 Magnum revolver hanging on
her left side by her hip bone, the dump pouches with the spare ammo crossing her
chest between her breasts. Rourke looked back to the road, hearing the sounds of
Rubenstein checking the German MP-40, the gun the younger man still called a
"Schmeisser."
Rourke shifted his shoulders under the weight of the twin Detonics stainless
.45s in the double Alessi shoulder rig, then reached into his breast pocket and
snatched a cigar. He fished the lighter from his Levis and as he did, the girl
took it from his hand and worked it for him, holding the blue yellow-flamed
Zippo just right, below the tip of the cigar so the flame could be drawn up into
it. "Where'd you learn to light a cigar?" he asked, nodding his thanks.
"My father smoked them," the girl said, then closed the lighter and handed it
back to him.
"What else did your father do?" Rourke asked, clamping the cigar in the left
side of his mouth between his teeth and turning the steering wheel into an easy
right onto an oif Tamp from the highway.
"He was a doctor—a medical doctor," the girl answered, "like you are. When I was
a little girl," she said, "I was always going to grow up and be his nurse. But
he died when I was eighteen," she added, her voice sounding strange and without
the easy confidence he had become accustomed to hearing in it.
"I'm sorry," Rourke said quietly.
"I guess time makes everyone an orphan, doesn't it," Rubenstein said, sounding
as though he were speaking more to himself than to Rourke or the girl. Rourke
turned and looked at Rubenstein, saying nothing.
"Over there!" the girl said suddenly.
Rourke glanced back down the road and to his left. In the distance—in what must
have been an athletic field—he could see a crude circle of semitrailer trucks
and several dozen motorcycles, all moving slowly, dust filling the air around
them. There were gunshots now, over the noise of the truck and bike engines, and
again Rourke thought he heard what could have been screams, coming from inside
the circle of trucks.
"What the hell are they doing?" Rubenstein asked.
"I think I know," the girl answered.
"They've apparently gotten their mass executions into some kind of ritual,
working themselves up into a frenzy before they do them, terrifying the victims
too." As Rourke spoke, the trucks began slowing down, the dust thinning. "And it
looks like they're ready for their number," he added.
"I didn't think there were so many crazy people in the world," Rubenstein
remarked, his eyes wide and staring at the trucks and the gradually diminishing
dust cloud.
"Some people, maybe most people," Natalie began, "can't handle violence
of it—"
Rourke finished for her, turning their truck off the road and crossing onto the
far edge of the football field. "It's the reptilian portion of the brain coming
to the fore. A lot of work was done on it just before the war. The reptile
portion of the brain is the part obsessed with ritual and violence, and
sometimes there's little to differentiate between the two. You look at just
normal things—fraternity initiations, street gangs, all sorts of things like
that. The violence and the ritual eventually so intermingle that you can't have
one without the other; one causes the other."
"Like rape, Paul," Natalie said. "Or sex-related murders. Is intercourse or
death the purpose of the act, or just something that happens as a result, the
act itself being the purpose?"
"I think Behavioral Psych 101 just let out, gang," Rourke said softly, starting
to slow the pickup truck as he wove it between two of the nearest semis and into
the circle.
The girl beside him unsnapped the thumbreak opening flap on the holster with the
big Python. Rubenstein pulled back the bolt on the "Schmeisser."
"Be cool," Rourke cautioned, stopping the pickup truck in the approximate center
of the circle. In front of the hood were perhaps fifty people, mostly women and
children, a few older men, some of them still in pajamas or nightgowns, their
clothes torn, their faces dirty and their eyes filled with terror. Rourke
whispered, "This must be the place," and shut off the key on the pickup truck
and swung open the driver's side door and stepped out, the CAR-15 slung under
his right shoulder now, his fist wrapped around the pistol grip.
The knot of townspeople stared at him, almost as though they collectively made
one frightened organism. He looked away from them, rolling the cigar in the
corner of his mouth, his chin jutting forward, his legs slightly apart. He
turned and looked behind the pickup truck. Already perhaps a dozen or more of
the motorcyclists from the brigand gang were walking toward him, some of the
drivers of the eighteen-wheelers were climbing down from their cabs and walking
toward him as well. Rourke squinted against the sun and shot a glance
skyward—the entire northwestern quadrant was so gray it almost seemed black by
contrast to the deep blue of the sky above him. The wind was picking up, making
tiny dust devils around his feet.
"Who the fuck are you?" The voice came from a tall man, Rourke's height or
better, but an easy fifty pounds heavier, wearing a dark blue denim shirt with
the sleeves cut off, leaving frayed edges across his rippling shoulder muscles.
He wore a military-style shoulder holster, a stag-gripped .45 automatic riding
in it on the left side of his chest. In his right hand was a riot shotgun, with
extension magazine and a sling, web materialed, blowing now slightly in the wind
like the man's dark, greasy-looking hair.
"Rourke—he's Paul Rubenstein, the girl's name is Natalie." Out of the corner of
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p; his left eye, Rourke could see Rubenstein, standing half-inside the cab of the
pickup truck, the MP-40 submachine gun held lazily in his left hand across the
roof of the cab. The girl was already out of the pickup truck, standing beside
Rourke and a little behind him.
"The goddamn names don't mean shit to me, man—what d'ya want here?"
Rourke sighed, a small cloud of the gray cigar smoke filtering through his
nostrils as he rolled the cigar in the corner of his mouth. "Got the paramils
after us—we hit a truck back a ways and boosted some ammo and stuff. Killed a
coupla their guys gettin' away—figured you might be able to use a few extra
people who could handle a gun. You got those suckers less than a day behind you
and you guys leave plenty of tracks," and Rourke gestured over his right
shoulder with the cigar toward the townspeople huddled behind him.
"We got enough people can handle a gun, buddy—what the hell we need you for?"
"You're amateurs, I'm professional—I'm worth at least any three of your guys."
"Bullshit," the big guy laughed. "I'm gonna kill me these little pieces of
scared dogshit behind you, then we'll see just how good you are."
to his right, blocking the big man's path. "You know," Rourke whispered, his
face inches from the face of the brigand, "you guys are real assholes."
The brigand turned, his face red with rage, his hands starting to move.
Rourke—again whispering— said, "Go ahead—from here I can't miss," and he edged
the CAR-15 slightly forward, the muzzle almost touching the bigger man's stomach
just above the belt buckle. "See, you guys keep knockin' off the civilian
population, after a while, no matter how many of 'em you kill, they're gonna
finally get just mad enough to band together and come after you guys—then you'll
have them and the paramils on your neck. Same thing happened to the Romans, two
thousand years later it happened to the Nazis when they marched into the Ukraine
in Russia. How would you like snipers behind every rock, explosives under every
bridge? It can happen to you, friend."
"What d'ya want? I'm askin' again."
"I told you—me and my friends wanna join up for the duration," Rourke told him.
"You're as good as any three of us, huh?" the bigger man said, a smile crossing
his lips.
Rourke smiled back, nodding, the cigar now just a stump in the left corner of
his mouth. "Easy." Rourke glanced toward the growing knot of brigands and their
women collecting perhaps a yard behind the pickup's tailgate. He could see the
warning look in Natalie's eyes, the worry written across Paul Rubenstein's
sweat-dripping face.
Then, in a loud voice, the man shouted, "This man is named Rourke—he claims he's
some kinda lousy professional—as good as any three of us. I need two men to help
me show him different!" More than a dozen men, as big at least as the brigand
standing inches away from Rourke, stepped out of the knot of onlookers. "You,
ahh, you wanna pick 'em?" the brigand said, smiling.
"You the head honcho around here?" Rourke asked.
"Yeah—I'm the leader—you backin' out?"
"No, no—nothin' like that," Rourke said softly. "I was just wonderin' if you had
your replacement picked yet."
"Bite my—"
"Not in front of the lady," Rourke said, gesturing with the CAR-15.
Loud again, so all the brigands could hear, apparently, the brigand leader
shouted, "If Rourke wins, he and his people can join us and we let all them over
there go and everythin'," and the brigand leader pointed toward the townspeople,
visibly cringing now, some of the children crying out loud. "But if he don't,"
the brigand shouted then, "we kill him and the other guy and the little piece
they got with 'em—after we all have some fun with her first, huh?" There was
some laughter by the men who'd stepped forward for the contest, and from the
crowd behind them as well.
"You pickin' them or me?" Rourke said.
"Hey—I'll pick," the brigand leader laughed, gesturing broadly with his
outstretched hands.
Moisture was already falling on Rourke's hands and face, thunder rumbling in the
sky off to his left, what sunlight there had been fading and replaced by a
greenish glow that seemed to be in the air, something he felt he could almost
reach out and touch. "Be quick about it, huh," Rourke said. "I don't feel like
standin' around in the rain all day waitin' for you—guns, knives, what?"
The brigand leader looked at Rourke, his eyes traveling up and down, then said,
"We fight barehanded—Taco, Kleiger—up here—everybody back off and give us some
room!"
"What's your name—don't like fightin' somebody if I don't know his name."
"Mike."
"I've got a son named Michael—he's tougher than you, though," Rourke smiled.
The brigand leader backed away, slipping the shoulder rig off his chest and
wrapping the strap around it, then handing the holstered .45 and the riot
shotgun into the crowd.
Rourke flipped the safety on the CAR-15 rasped, "Natalie!" and tossed the gun
across the six feet or so separating them. The girl caught it in both hands,
moving the sling onto her right shoulder and then diagonally across her body,
the pistol grip settling in her comparatively tiny right fist. Rourke could hear
the safety clicking off. He slipped off the shoulder rig, and both guns
together, he handed it across the roof of the pickup cab to Rubenstein. "If I
die, I'll will 'em to you," Rourke whispered to Rubenstein.
Already, the brigand leader—Mike—was stripping the denim shirt from his body,
the muscles on his arms and chest and neck wet with sweat, rippling even in the
greenish light that now seemed heavy on the air itself. Thunder was rumbling
low, and the rain was now starting to dot the dust of the burnt-dry football
field with dark spots, the smell of the air somehow fresher and cooler.
Rourke stripped off his own light blue shirt, palming the Sting IA and dropping
it in his jeans pocket. The girl reached out her left hand and took the shirt.
Rourke walked forward, away from the truck, joining the three brigands already
waiting for him, his moving close to them completing a ragged circle.
The brigand leader, his eyes bright and laughing, shouted, "Kleiger here, he
used to be an instructor in unarmed combat in the Marine Corps a few years back.
Now Taco is kind of special—made his living ever since he was a kid as a bar
fighter down in Mexico. See all them scars? Me, I did time once for killing a
man once with my hands—I just crushed his skull with 'em."
"Well," Rourke said softly, "then I'll try and make you fellas look good so you
don't get too embarrassed by all of this."
"Get him!" Mike roared, and the wiry guy called Taco, and then Kleiger—bigger
than the brigand leader—started forward, slow, unhurried, relaxed looking.
Rourke waited. Kleiger started feigning a low savate kick, then wheeled, his
left fist flashing outward, but already Rourke had sidestepped, wheeling, his
left foot cutting in low, catching Kleiger on the right side and knocking him
off balance. Rourke sidestepped again, a solid right coming at him from the one
called Taco. The blow glanced off the side of Rourke's head, stunning him,
driving him back. As Taco followed with a left hook, Rourke blocked it with his
right, smashing his own left in a short-arm blow to the solar plexus, then
crossing his right into the left side of Taco's nose, following with his left
foot into Taco's crotch, the foot arched and hammering in with the force of a
brick through a mirror. Out of the corner of his eye, Rourke could see Kleiger,
back on balance and roaring toward him. Rourke wheeled, feigning another low
kick, then sidestepped fast to his left, lashing out with his right then his
left hand, hammering into Kleiger's face and neck. As Kleiger stumbled back, the
brigand leader, Mike, dove toward Rourke, knocking Rourke back and of his feet,
the man's huge hands going for Rourke's neck, his right knee smashing upward,
hammering against Rourke's right thigh, going for Rourke's crotch. Rourke hooked
his right thumb in the left corner of Mike's mouth and ripped. As Mike's head
started pulling away, Rourke freed his left fist and crossed Mike's jaw with a
short jab, rolled away and hauled himself to his feet, punching a short knee
raise upward into the doubled-over Mike's jaw, then smashing the toe of his
right combat boot forward into the brigand leader's teeth. Rourke's right hand
held the man by the hair.
Kleiger was starting for Rourke again, and Rourk stepped back. Taco was up, his
nose a mass of blood streaming down over his mouth and onto his naked sweating
chest. Both men edged slowly toward Rourke, Kleiger making his move then and
starting wheeling series of punches and kicks. Rourke backed off from the first
series, then stepped forward blocking a side-hammer blow from Kleiger's left
then smashing his own left down into the exposed left kidney, then jamming his
left foot upward into Kleiger's crotch, his left hand in a straight-edge classic
karate chop slashing across the left side of Kleiger's neck and knocking him
away, Kleige collapsing forward to the ground on his face.
But Taco was already coming at Rourke, his left fist flying outward and Rourke
got a half-step back before Taco's fist impacted against his jaw. Rourke head
snapped back, Taco's right crossing up toward his face, and Rourke dodged it,