The Awakening

PL

They kept moving, his fist tightening on theM-16, twenty-nine rounds in the magazine, one round already chambered.

“I am frightened,” she whispered again, and again the echoing, the thousand whispers, only more distorted now. The construction of the cave—how much was man-made he was uncertain

—formed a natural whispering gallery, a natural security system for the slightest sound. Gradually, he had been becoming more aware v of their reverberating footfalls. If he did fire a burst from the M-16, aside from the potential for ricochet, there would be a deafening noise. He kept moving.

His mind raced, calculating the possibilities for a hidden entrance. There were shackles built into the side wall—to secure the sacrifices. He had read the books his father had read before constructing the main entrance to the Retreat. Was the doorway to this place opened by a system of weights and counterbalances? It would have to be, he reasoned, for otherwise, how could the structure be secured against unwanted entrance when the owners or users were all away. It was obvious to him, that what he was about to enter—however he was about to enter it—was a survival retreat, constructed before the Night of The War, But how had the people survived?

Then a thought chilled him. The constant level of population. It had to be as he had surmised—

genocide, institutionalized genocide with victims who were willing to go. nft There were no large rocks visible, like there were outside the Retreat. Where was?… He heard the sound, wheeled toward it, shielding Madison behind him, swing-ing the M-16 forward taut against its black web sling, a panel opening out of the living rock, a human face, and then another and another, men, three of them, immaculately tailored three-piece business suits, but in bizarre contrast to this each of the men wore bedroom slippers. In their hands were swagger-stick-shaped objects, perhaps eighteen inches in length. The cattle prods, Michael surmised.

“All right—hold it. I’m coming as a friend. I don’t mean you any harm. You know what this is,” and he gestured with the assault rifle. “But the girl isn’t to be touched. You expelled her and she’s with me now.” He felt her hands against his shoulder blades.

One of the three men—a man on each side of him—smiled. “You are not from the Place. You are not from Them. Others live then.” “Others live.” Michael nodded, lowering the muzzle of the M-16 slightly. “My family, two of our friends. And there was an aircraft. I didn’t find the wreckage, but I found the pilot’s parachute. And the pilot was slaughtered by the ones you call Them. I didn’t have any chance to search through his things and find out where he came from. But there must be others alive as well, and somewhere technology has survived. The world can rebuild and grow and there’ll be no need for all of you to live here underground and—“

“Michael!” It began as a word and ended as a scream, Michael wheeling, the pressure of Madi-son’s hands against his back suddenly gone. Madison was being dragged toward the opposite wall by more of the men in immaculately tailored three-piece business suits and bedroom slippers, cattle prods held to her flesh as she screamed incomprehensibly.

Michael moved the M-16 forward, opening his mouth to shout, to order them—then trie pain. At first he could locate the origins. The small of his back, the center of the back of his neck—the word he remembered abstractly was “nape”—and where his right arm joined his shoulder.

The M-16 fell from his hand, on its sling, his body twitching uncontrollably, the pain flooding him now, Madison screaming, “Michael!” the pain, Michael Rourke falling to his knees, feeling something he had never felt before, everything in his field of vision fuzzy suddenly and green and a cold sweat on his skin, the feeling of nausea in his stomach. He sagged forward, rolling on the rock floor of the cave, trying to make his right hand respond and find the pistol grip of the M-16. Through the green wave washing over him he saw Madison being dragged through the opening in the rock wall on the opposite side of the cave.

She screamed again, and he heard it as his eyes closed and his head struck against the rock and the darkness flooded his consciousness. “Michael!”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

In the intervening day, she had seen her mother four times. Four times her mother left the room her father had built for he and his wife to share, entered the bathroom and then returned to the room.

She sal at her sewing machine, her left foot on the pedal that gave the machine its electrical power, her left hand feeding the material beneath the needle, her right hand giving added tension to the thread, working the hand wheel on the side of the machine as she hemmed the blue floral print skirt she had been making for the last several months. She did most of her sewing by hand—it consumed more time and the supply of fabric was not inexhaustible, but she wanted this finished now so she could wear it when Paul returned. Annie looked up from the machine, her mother standing in front of her. Sarah Rourke wore a man’s shirt—Michael’s or their father’s. It was blue chambray and there were at least three dozen of them. Her mother’s hands were inside the pockets of a pair of blue jeans. On her feet she wore no shoes or socks. “Let’s talk, Ann.”

Ann—no one called her that. “I can make us some tea—you’ll like it.”

“You make the tea, I’ll make some lunch. I’m hungry.”

“I can—“

“I know you can—but I’ll make it.”

Annie flicked off the light on the sewing machine and stood up… “He likes you—I don’t mean Paul. I mean, that’s obvious, but I mean your father.” Sarah Rourke was stirring sliced potatoes in a frying pan. She had taken meat from the freezers. “Why’d you look at me so oddly when I took out the meat?”

“There isn’t very much meat, Momma, and Michael and I always saved it for special occasions, I was thinking I’d make a roast when Daddy and Paul and Natalia got back with Michael—like a special occasion. It’ll be the first time the whole family—“ “The whole family,” her mother repeated. “Yes, just the six of us. A father and mother who collectively aren’t ten years older than their children’s ages combined. The four of us, plus Paul and good old Natalia, the KGB

major. Paul’s very nice. I’m surprised at the friendship between Paul and your father. Your father never really made friends. He raised you to mate with Paul.” “I know that—but that’s not why I feel the way I do, and if Paul feels the same way, that isn’t why for him either.”

“You’re probably right. And he raised Michael for Natalia—that’s obvious.”

“He was trying to—“

“Did your father ever ask me?”

“The potatoes will burn.”

“No, they won’t, I’ve been doing this a hell of a lot longer than you have. He never asked me. I took the sleep expecting to wake up at the same ion time everyone else awakened. Not to wake up twenty years after my children did, not to find them already grown just so Natalia and Paul wouldn’t be forced to marry or whatever it is people can do when there are only six people alive on earth.” She cut off the burner and began shifting the potatoes into a serving bowl, then took a potholder and checked the oven for the meat. “Your father never cheated on me—never once. I’m sure of that. But he cheated me, cheated me more than he ever could have if he’d cheated on me.”

“But we—“

Sarah turned around, her eyes staring, harder than Annie had ever seen them. “If you marry Paul Rubenstein, if you and Paul have children—how would you feel closing your eyes and seeing them as children, then opening your eyes the next instant of consciousness and seeing them fully grown, missing all the years in the middle. How would you feel? Who told you what to expect when you were growing up—from your body, I mean? Who taught you everything you didn’t teach yourself?”

“Well, Daddy did, but—“

Sarah Rourke whispered, “You finish dinner— I’m not hungry.”

“But…”

Annie watched her mother walk away, to the bedroom, but Sarah Rourke didn’t look back.

It wasn’t as Annie had planned it—it wasn’t that way at all.

Chapter Thirty

John Rourke dismounted the Harley. By taking a route through the mountains that he and Paul Rubenstein had learned of by accident in the weeks following the Night of The War, he had saved two days of travel. Natalia dismounted as well. All about them were telltale signs of a camp. A fragmentary motorcycle tread.

Burned wood from a fire, and signs of a fire being meticulously put out.

“He’s been here, all right,” Paul volunteered.

Rourke looked at the younger man, but only nodded. Rourke studied the partial tread print, looking up from it, ahead, then taking off in a long-strided jog, his eyes scanning the ground through the dark-lensed aviator-style sunglasses, a cigar, unlit, clamped between his teeth in the left corner of his mouth.

Another tire impression—he stopped running, dropping to his knees to examine it. “Natalia, bring up my bike. Paul, cut an arc of about one hundred eighty degrees about a hundred yards ahead of me—ninety degrees on each side of where I’m at now.”

“Tracks—right.”

Rourke stood to his full height, taking the Zippo in his right hand, flipping it in his hand, not opening it, not really intending to light the cigar as yet. He glanced skyward, then confirmed the time with his watch. Three hours of daylight remained. If he could second guess Michael’s route as he had earlier, they might be able to cut through the mountains again in such a way as to intercept Michael’s next campsite before total darkness. He was trying to cut the gap of time between them. Rourke felt a smile cross his lips—he realized, chronologically less than a decade older than his son, that he’d already done that.

“Ready.”

He looked at Natalia, then looked away as he mounted the machine.

Chapter Thirty-One

He had lost count of the hours, and realized he had lost count of the days. The cattle prods they had used—his body ached as he moved. He had been away from the Retreat—how many days?

He shook his head to clear it, dismissing the question until a later time.

Cautiously, before assessing his surroundings, he felt under his shirt beside his left hipbone. The revolver—it was still there. As he sat upright, his back screaming at him with the pain, he felt inside his left sock—the A.G. Russell knife was still there.

Michael Rourke looked up, unable to keep the smile that he felt coming from etching across his face. He was alive. He was armed. He assessed his surroundings as, with difficulty, he stood. An ordinary-seeming room, but there were no windows. A door—it seemed made of metal. He approached it, about to touch it to confirm—but he stepped back. With their pen-chant for electricity, he was uncertain. He looked upward—there seemed to be no observation cameras in evidence, no microphones. Perhaps the room—almost a khaki color for walls, ceiling and the linoleum-covered floor—was just that, a room. Nothing more.

Perhaps too they expected him to walk out of it. He licked his lips, reaching down to his sock, removing the Sting IA. Gently, he tossed the all-steel knife against the door. It clattered to the floor. There was no evidence of electricity. He picked up the knife, stepping back from the door again.

He threw the knife—gently, again—this time the knife bouncing against the doorknob, sparks of electricity sputtering into the air. Michael Rourke stepped back.

After a long moment, he picked up his knife. Quickly, he resheathed it, concealing it, then dropped to the floor. He began to unlace his right combat boot. His father had told him the story of the last seconds before fire had engulfed the planet, of the climb to the top of the mountain which held the Retreat, of using the double magazine pouch like a heavy leather glove to insulate his hand. The boot off now, Michael placed his right hand inside it, flexing the leather so he could grip with it.

He thought suddenly of Madison. If they had killed her, he would kill them—it was very simple, very logical. He remembered, as they had lain together after discovering each other, she had asked him what the white flakes which fell from the sky had been and he had explained the crys-talline structures which when examined were never at all like any other. He had explained that some had theorized that perhaps as they fell, the flakes may indeed have fallen into certain patterns and that the infinite variety came about from the constant melting and refreezing they underwent as they passed through different temperature layers, or fell upon the warm ground to partially melt and then refreeze. She had stopped him, laughing, telling him that she thought they made his hair and his eyebrows look pretty. What did one call them, she had asked. Snow, he had told her. And she had repeated the word several times.

He approached the doorknob—he’d free her somehow, he told himself.

But as he reached for the doorknob, the knob sparked, then turned.

Michael Rourke drew back, ready to go for his gun. One of the men in a three-piece business suit stepped into the doorway from the corridor which Michael could partially see beyond him.

“You are to come with us. The Ministers wish to see you. We can use the electric sticks again if you resist.”

Smiling, he dropped to the floor. “Just let me get my boot on, guys.”

Chapter Thirty-Two

They had traveled for most of the night, gotten six hours of rest and then moved on before daylight. More of the shortcuts through the mountains and John Rourke estimated they had saved perhaps as much as two days of travel time compared to Michael’s route. He was exploring. They were searching, a more single-minded pursuit, Rourke had told Paul Rubenstein.

Natalia beside him now, Paul on foot moving through the woods beyond the clearing, looking for signs, John Rourke stood, staring at the remains of a fire. It was not one of Michael’s fires. Littered around the clearing, most prominently near, the fire, were human bones.

Natalia, her voice low, whisperlike, said, “Can-nibals.” “Michael parked his bike and moved through the clearing on foot—he went right to them.”

“Human beings, John—he was looking for more of his own kind. That’s why he left the Retreat. But there was no sign of him returning to the bike.” “He headed after them/’ Rourke added som-berly.

He looked at her, Natalia’s eyes looking into his. “What would you have done?” He laughed a little. “Gone after them—just like Michael—under the circumstances.”

“You told me you taught him to be very good with a gun. And Annie—she said he practiced regularly.”

“Yeah, but all he took with him was one assault rifle and those two single-actions he liked. And two knives. That means, in a firefight, just one viable weapon. Those handguns are super for what they were built for—hunting, backup in the game fields, silhouette shooting. Not for combat. And anyway, he’s on his own.”

“They’ve been on their own for fifteen years. Annie told us Michael would leave the Retreat sometimes to go off exploring.”

“Never this long. And anyway—he’s not just some guy. He’s my son. I’m worried. Cannibals,” and he dropped into a crouch beside an almost neatly stacked pile of human ribs, the bones spotless.

“John—oh, shit—John!”

Rourke was up, running, Natalia ahead of him, both of the Metalife Custom L-Frames which bore the American Eagle symbols on the barrel flats coming into her hands, Rourke snatching the Python from the full flap holster at his hip. He slowed his run, Natalia stopped already beside Paul Rubenstein, Paul’s hands shaking, the sling for the MP-40 subgun rattling. Rourke walked over to stand between them. In the bushes was a human head, the smell of the rotting tissue strong. The eyebrows were reddish tinged; the scalp and the skin above the middle of the forehead had been peeled away. “Cannibals?”

Rourke looked at Rubenstein. “Yeah,” he almost whispered.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Michael Rourke glanced at his Rolex—the date had changed, ever closer to Christmas and the time set for the Awakening. He had been imconscious from the electrical shocks overnight. They—the three men in the business suits—had let him stop in a bathroom. He had urinated and defecated, and washed his face and hands, noticing the stubble on his cheeks as he studied his face momentarily in the mirror. He looked identical to the sleeping visage of his father in the cryogenic chamber.

His three business-suited guards with their high-powered cattle prods walked with him as he moved down the corridor now, a large, double-doored room at one end. Was it the armory Madison had spoken of? he wondered. He made a mental note to investigate it.

The corridor made a left bend and at the far end where the corridor stopped there were two ornate wooden doors, like something one might expect forming the doorway of a conference room.

“You will go inside and await the Ministers,” the one who had spoken earlier told him, opening the right hand door. Michael noticed the door handle. It looked to be made of gold and ornately figured. “What about you guys?” Michael asked.

“The Ministers will see you.” The man held open the door. Michael walked through. The room was lit with conventional-looking ceiling fixtures, but bulbs rather than the fluorescent tubes which would have been more in keeping with the room, he thought.

A long, expensive-looking conference table dominated the center of the room, space to sit perhaps two dozen people: mentally, subcon-sciously, he began counting the chairs—twenty-eight, one larger chair at each end. At the far end, before the larger of the two largest chairs, were two candles, but neither candle was lit. He was alone in the room as far as he could ascertain. He looked to the walls on each side of the room, and then to the wall on the far side of the room. Murals, crudely painted, very stylized, at once modern, primitive and yet almost juvenile, filled the walls. His mouth was suddenly dry. It was the Night of The War, cities burning, missiles raining down from the skies. He had seen none of this where they had taken shelter that night in the barn opposite their house. But he had heard the stories around the campfires of the Resistance, remem-bered the stories his father had told of overflying the cities that night as they were systematically turned to ashes. Both flanking walls depicted this horror and he looked away from it, to a horror that had been worse, one he had seen, did remember, could never forget. It was the last sunrise, the holocaust, the end of the world, the sky aflame, lightning bolts crackling through the skies, ball lightning rolling across the ground, bodies on fire—death.

“These have meaning to you, young man?”

He turned around. The conference room doors closed. There were seven men, all in immaculately tailored business suits and red fabric bedroom slippers, their ages varying from younger than his own to what he judged might be late seventies. The same voice—the oldest one of them was slightly bent, balding to the point where a wispy fringe of white crowned the sides of his head, the light from the overhead bulbs gleaming dully off his head. “You remember this from stories?” “I saw this—with my own eyes—the holocaust, when the skies caught fire.”

“Heresy,” one of the others murmured.

“But I—I am very old, and I saw none of this.”

“It’s a long story—but we utilized a special scientific process, for cryogenic sleep.”

“What is this cryo—this—“

“Cryogenic sleep.”

“We?”

“My father and mother, my sister, our two friends. The six of us. We’d thought we were the only people left alive.”

“You wear shoes of leather, boy.”

Michael Rourke looked at his feet, and then at their own. “They were made five centuries ago but well-cared for.”

The old one who had done all of the speaking except for the word “heresy” laughed.

“Five-hundred-year-old shoes on a five-hundred-year-old man who looks to be perhaps thirty years old—

“I turn thirty next month—but what I say is true. Who are you?” Michael asked.

“I am the man who will decide your fate, along with my six associates.”

Michael Rourke licked his lips. “What is the Place?”

“It is our home.” The old one smiled, almost laughing.

“Who are Them?”

“Outcasts, young man—they are outcasts.”

“From where?”

“From the Place, outcasts sent from the Place over the course of the last several decades.”

“Where is Madison?”

“She who was Madison fifteen, until it was decided she would be one who goes?”

“Yes—the one you call Madison fifteen.”

“She was called that, but she is called nothing now.” Michael started for the old one, but the man raised his hands, palms outward and he smiled. “For the moment, this girl is quite safe and quite well. You will see her again, I assure you.”

“I came here in peace. I saved Madison from the ones you call Them. I forced her to bring me here. I search for people of my own kind. Do you have aircraft?” “Machines which fly? Of course not.”

“Someone does—there was a crash. I couldn’t find the wreckage. But the pilot—I found his parachute. And he was being killed by Them. That’s how I came to rescue Madison. I only came for knowledge—not for violence. Believe that.” “You came with the guns. This one is called a handgun,I think?”

“Yes—a handgun.”

“And the other one—it is called?”

“An automatic rifle.” He said nothing of his knowledge of the arsenal which he had gained from Madison.

“We have many such implements, but they are never used. They are dusted, they are given oil—“ “Where do you get oil from?”

“Peanuts which we grow. We distill an oil to a specific formula given to us over the ages.”

“Why do you keep guns if you don’t have a use for them?” “They were used by our progenitors and have religious value to us and this is why we preserve them. But we do not need to make shoot with them.” “To make shoot,” Michael repeated. “Right.” He wished he smoked like his father had. “Listen —I came in peace. Give me my guns, give me the girl—I’ll leave with her.”

“Your guns have been added to ours. There they shall remain.”

“Fine—gimme the girl, then. You keep the guns.” “We will not give you the girl and allow you to leave, as you say, because then you might tell others of this place.”

“There are no others,” Michael told him. “Except the cannibals. No others. Whoever came in that plane, I don’t know where he came from, and even if I did, I wouldn’t tell him about you—if you let us go in peace.” “Have you no curiosity, young man—about us? We have about you. Tell us your story and we shall tell you ours.”

“I’d love to, but maybe some other time. I’ll bring Madison back to visit or something.”

The old one laughed. “A sense of humor—my goodness. How refreshing.”

“Thanks. Now—“

“No. We shall recount our story. We have never before had the chance,” and the old man started from the doors and crossed near Michael. Michael felt the temptation to reach out and throttle the man, use him as a wedge to get past the others and find Madison and escape. The old man just looked at him. “If you attack me, it will gain you nothing. It is nearly time that I become one who goes. Harming me, or the threat of harming me will not gain your freedom from here. But you must be curious.”

“All right, I’m curious—tell me.”

The old man smiled and Michael noticed that a cataract partially covered his left eye. “Do you have doctors?” Michael asked as the old man shuffled toward the head of the table, “We have healers but an attempt to prolong the time before one goes is forbidden.”

“Super—just let people die.”

“One does not do this thing you say, young man—one goes.” The old man was easing into the largest chair, before the two candies. “You go outside and get torn apart by those can-nibals like you sent Madison.

You die—pure and simple.”

The old man laughed.

The other six men moved about the room, one lighting the two candles at the head of the conference table, another opening a wall safe behind an inset wood carving in the back wall, the carving out of place amid the mural of the end of the world. From the safe, another of the six assisting him, he withdrew two books. One was leather-bound and the size of a Bible or un-abridged dictionary, the other smaller, leather-bound as well, but the size of a diary. “What are those?” Michael asked.

The old man looked up, “Why, the holy books, of course.”

“The large book—it’s a Bible, right? But the other one—it looks like a diary.” “It is the last book, written by our progenitors and it is locked and shall remain so for all time.”

“You revere a book as holy and yet you have no way of knowing what it contains?” The old man smiled indulgently again. With great effort, he stood, one of the others assisting him. He reached to his vest pocket, extracting from it on the end of what appeared to be a gold chain a small key. “As head of the counsel of the Ministers, I carry the key. It is my badge of office. The key will unlock the second holy book, but the key is given to us to test our faith and will never be used as it has never been used.”

“If it’s a diary, it probably tells something you should know—it’s not wrong to pry into the”

writings of someone who’s gone if it will help you to stay alive in a situation like this.”

“You are a most peculiar young man.” The old man smiled again as he sat. “The second holy book is five centuries old. And to stay alive as you put it is not a problem to us. And what situation? A situation requiring desperate measures? I think you misunderstand me. We thrive here. We have happiness here. There is no desire to alter this at all. So, then, why should sacrilege be committed and the second holy book be opened? But perhaps you will better understand after I recount our story.”

“Go ahead.” Michael nodded.

“Be seated—there, in the far chair from me.”

Michael looked at the second largest of the two large chairs. He moved the chair as he approached it—no wires, nothing out of the ordinary. He sat down, placing his hands on the polished table before him. “So, tell me your story, if that’s what you want.”

“Yes—it is what we want, young man.”

“My name is Michael—Michael Rourke.”

“The Place,” the old man began, seemingly oblivious to Michael having given his name, “was built more than five centuries ago, and at great expense and labor. It was the fashion, as the story has been passed down to us, for persons to plan to survive warfare among the nations of men, or disease, or economic trials. And so, the Place was built. And it was staffed. Because of the guns and because of the expense of the fixtures here in the Place, security persons were used to protect the Place from outsiders. The war between the great nation of the United Statesof and the evil nation of Commie took place—“ “It’s the United States of America, not United Statesof, and the nation of Commie—it was the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was run by a Communist government, and sometimes Com-munists were called Commies. You’re telling me an oral tradition, aren’t you?”

The old man resumed, as though, Michael realized, nothing had been said. “The war between the United Statesof and the Commie began, but our very wise progenitors foresaw this time of grief and took shelter in the Place and the Place sustained their every need. Time passed, and the great fires came from the heavens and consumed the earth as it was prophesied in the Holy Bible. But our progenitors in their wisdom had become the Chosen of God and it was His decree that the Place and our progenitors remain unscathed. And when the fires consumed all that was evil and had purged the land and the waters and the air, only the progenitors and their servants remained. Yet the servants were evil, consumed by jealousy of the wisdom of the progenitors and sought to hurl out the progenitors from the Place, but they were not successful, and as punishment for this blasphemy, the servants were put out. It was decreed that the number of one hundred persons should not be exceeded over seven days. And so, it is the descendants of the servants who are set out into the evil of hell which surrounds us, and consumed by Them, the ones who eat the flesh.” The old one looked up, smiling—he seemed somehow pleased. Perhaps that he had remem-bered it all, Michael conjectured. “What you’re saying is that you practice institutionalized geno-cide on persons you consider racial inferiors. And that the ones you threw out eventually became able to survive, by cannibalism, and now you continue the practice to feed them.” “You eat flesh—this can be seen from the things you wear on your feet.” “I eat meat, but the meat of cattle and other animals raised for human consumption. But since the holocaust, there has been no fresh meat so we eat very little meat at all.”

“By his own words, he admits his origin, sir,” one of the younger business-suited men said to the old one.

“From hell thou art and to hell thou shalt return—both you and the girl.” Michael stood up.

“Wonderful—you’re letting us leave. You think outside is hell—this is hell. Never going outside, killing people to keep the population in perfect balance. You’re all crazy.”

“They shall be bound and set aside to be consumed by Them.” Michael’s right hand flashed under his shirt, the button there already open, his fist closing around the butt of the Predator.

“Uh-uh, guys.” Michael stabbed the .44 forward, aiming it toward the opposite end of the table, his right thumb jacking back the hammer. “You’re plain out of luck. I’m finding Madison and my guns and I’m gettin’ the hell out of here.”

“See how he defiles the Conference Room!” It was the one who had proclaimed Michael as guilty.

“See how I defile your face when I blow your fuckin’ brains out,” Michael whispered, his voice low. “My advice—open that diary, read it. Maybe you were meant to read it, and if you weren’t, then maybe you should anyway.” Michael started toward the door, backing up, glancing once behind him—the doors were still closed. He assumed the three guys with the cattle prods would be outside—but the gun would even the odds substantially. “Where do you keep the girl?”

The old one smiled, but said nothing.

Michael nodded. “OK, I’ll find her—then we’ll be out of your hair, you’ll pardon the expression.” he added, the light reflecting from the top of the man’s head.

Behind him, he felt the doors. He reached for the handle…

“Not gold,” he rasped, the electricity surging through him, the Customized Ruger falling from his right fist, not discharging, his body shaking, trembling, pain. “No!” He sagged forward, the blackness coming, but his hand unable to release the door handle.

Chapter Thirty-Four

The door opened, and she shrank back into the corner, three of the ones from the Families, two of them with gloves on, dragging Michael. His body shook, his eyelids fluttered as they rested his body on the floor, walking from the room without looking at her, the third one closing the door. She Jeft her corner, on her knees, moving to be beside Michael, her right hand gently touching at him—she felt the mild shock his body still carried, her hand drawing back, cradled in the palm of her left hand on the faded gray skirt of her uniform.

“Michael—Michael, answer me. Michael— please—Michael!”

His eyelids fluttered again, but did not open.

His right hand—it twitched. The flesh on the inside of his fingers—it was black and burned.

She could not touch him until the electrical current left his body—she had seen what the electrical current could do before.

On her knees, still, she rocked her behind back against her heels, her body swaying, her hands still in her lap, her calves cold-feeling against the bare floor. It was a holding room. She knew where she would go. She had been placed in a holding room once before—when the Families ha4 selected her as one who goes. To Them.

She felt tears in her eyes, felt them dribble down her cheeks.

Her archangel.

Michael.

He was human after all.

And in her heart, the thing Michael had talked about as love—she felt it stronger for him now as she knelt at his side.

“Michael…”

Chapter Thirty-Five

The wind of the slip stream was cold against his face, but every few moments he would feel the warmth of Natalia’s breath against the back of his neck, her body close against his as they rode searching for Michael’s trail lost in the rocks an hour earlier. They had split up, Paul running a search pattern to the south, Rourke and Natalia searching to the north. AH they had uncovered was another campfire of the cannibals and more—but vastly less this time than before—of their ghastly leavings: human bones.

“John.”

He turned his face right, to speak over his right shoulder. “What is it?”

“I think I saw movement in the rocks—above us and to the left.” He nodded. “I saw it a little while ago. I think we’ve got company. Our cannibal friends.”

“What about Paul?”

“He’ll be all right—so’ll we. It’s Michael I’m worried about.” He glanced up into the rocks—a furtive blur of motion, then nothing. He slowed the Harley, stopping it at the close of a wide arc, cutting the engine. “What are you doing?”

“I’m going up there—gonna catch a cannibal. Get him to talk.”

“John!”

“They won’t come down here after us. I’ll go up after them.” He felt her hands leave his waist where they had rested as they had driven. She dismounted the Harley, Rourke dismounting as well. He un-zipped his coat, pulling off his gloves, folding them after straightening them, putting them in his bomber jacket’s left outside patch pocket. He took a cigar from the inside pocket of his jacket, the end already cut away as was his habit, putting the cigar in the left corner of his mouth, clamping it tight between his teeth. “You back me up from down here—and listen for any gunfire fr6m Paul. He should be on the other side of the rocks. If it sounds like he’s getting into trouble, you double back and I’ll cut across the top.”

“You don’t know how many of them there could be, John.” “They don’t have guns,” he told h^r, his voice low. “At least I don’t think they do. But I do. Anyway, maybe we can just talk,”

and he smiled.

“Don’t—I mean—just because it is Michael— don’t—“

“I won’t,” Rourke whispered, leaning toward her, kissing her cheek lightly. He pushed the CAR-15 farther back on its sling so it was across his back, then started toward the rocks.

Chapter Thirty-Six

He would find his son—there was no question of it, he knew. He kept moving, across the bare rock face, moving upward slowly, his rifle sway-ing away from his back, then swaying against it. He had seen no more movement above. Rourke looked back once, below him, Natalia, her hands on her hips, standing beside the jet-black Harley, black like the black of the jumpsuit she wore—her battle gear—black like the boots she wore. Black like the color of her hair—but her hair was only almost black for there was no true black in nature he knew. Rourke kept moving.

Sarah. Natalia. But now the task was to find Michael. He had laughed at Annie when she had awakened them early from the Sleep, laughed at her premonition, her dream. But the cannibals—

he had not anticipated this. How any men could have survived on the surface was incompre-hensible to him. There were mysteries in this new earth. If the Eden Project returned, there would soon be machining capabilities. Perhaps an aircraft could be built. As it was, the Harley’s engine would power a light biplane more than adequately. He kept moving, reaching up with his right hand, then bringing his left leg up, then his left hand, then his right leg, repeating the sequence as he climbed higher, the edge of the higher rocks more clearly discernible now. He kept moving.

His left hand reached out, and with his left leg he thrust himself up against the meager purchase below the height of the rocks, half falling forward onto the rock surface.

Rourke pushed himself up and rolled away from the edge, flat on his back for a moment, resting from the exertion in the thin air, setting himself as bait to the cannibals, for them to attack.

No one came.

After several minutes, he rolled onto his abdo-men, then pushed himself up, standing to his full height. He walked back toward the edge, waving down at Natalia. She waved back. Michael would be more used to the thinner air. In time, he too would become used to it.

He turned away from the edge, staring across the flat expanse of the height of the rocks. He reached into his Levi’s pocket, finding his lighter. He smoked less and less—in the thin air, intentionally damaging his lung capacity was insane. But he lit his cigar now, rolling the Zippo’s striking wheel under his thumb, plunging the tip of the cigar into the wind-dancing blue-yellow flame, flicking the cowling shut with an audible click. It was the stillness. No sudden engine noise betraying a Soviet patrol or a Brigand biker gang, no gunshots from off in the distance, no one. Nothing. The Earth was a dead place.

And he supposed the cannibals were its new-found scavengers. He moved ahead, dragging easily on the cigar, his breathing still rapid from the exertion of the climb, his rifle across his back again rather than at his side as he had placed it before making the final assault on the top. He wanted to look like easy prey.

Rourke kept walking.

Could these people talk? Could they under-stand?

Where had they come from?

If these cannibals lived, however few in number, others lived too, he knew.

He kept walking. “Hey—I want to talk,” he called.

No answer. “Do you speak English?”

No answer. “Habla EspanoB”

No answer. “Parlez-vous FrancaisV he laughed. He could ask the same question in German, in Russian, perhaps another language or two if he racked his brain for the right combination of words.

“I didn’t come to harm you,” he shouted. “I came searching for one who looks like me.”

And Rourke stopped. “One who looks like me,” he whispered. If Michael had met the cannibals and fought them off, they would think he— Rourke—was his own son. If Michael had died—a shiver ran along his spine. They would think he was Michael’s ghost.

He gambled on life, smiling to himself—it had been the one commodity on which he had always gambled.

He reached down to the holster at his hip, slowly withdrawing the Python. It was big, shiny—close enough in appearance to Michael’s handguns, at least to the untutored eye. Slowly, Rourke raised the gun over his head. Then slowly again, he dropped into a crouch, flexing his knees, setting the pistol on the ground. The CAR-15—it too looked near enough to Michael’s M-16. He slipped the sling over his head and set the rifle down, the safety off but the chamber empty. Michael carried two handguns, and Rourke reached under his jacket for the Detonics in the double Alessi rig. He-snapped the pistol from the leather, setting it down beside the Colt revolver and the CAR-15. There was still one under his right armpit. The little Detonics Combat Master .45 looked nothing like Michael’s smaller .44 Magnum Predator—but again, Rourke thought: To the untutored eye. v And a knife. He gambled Michael had likely had only the one knife visible—the big Gerber. Rourke unsheathed the black-handled Gerber Mkll and set it down beside his guns.

He stood. “There,” he shouted. “No weapons!”

He stepped back one step, then a second step, then a third. His palms sweated. There were boulder-sized rocks scattered all along the top of the mountain, and from behind one of these now stepped a man. He was clad in human skins, a woman’s head of hair dangling obscenely near his crotch. In his right hand was something Rourke considered at least slightly more mundane—a stone axe, the handle perhaps two feet long, a massive flat rock laced to it with what Rourke surmised would likely be human hair woven into rope. “Do you speak English?”

Rourke called out.

The cannibal’s face seamed with something half between a smile and a snarl, his body bending slightly forward as his left hand joined his right on the axe. From behind another rock, another of the cannibals, then from behind still another rock still a third, the second two armed like the first, each with a massive stone axe. Rourke owned one, a Cherokee Indian stone axe. But he had never fought with it—as these men, barely men, seemed intent to do. The first one—with the woman’s hair near his crotch—started forward in a loping, crouching walk. Rourke didn’t move away. “I didn’t come to kill you—probably. I want my son. He looks like me— just like me.”

The first cannibal was coming closer, the other two hanging back slightly. Rourke swallowed hard—the reason for the man’s loping walk, he realized, was a bullet wound, the left side of the man’s body sagging, leaves plastered over the left shoulder, dried blood there as well. The wind shifted, and Rourke could smell it—the wound was suppurating. “I’m a healer—for information on my son, I’ll heal your wound.”

The cannibal kept coming, raising the stone axe now to swing. The only other person alive—possibly—who could have shot the man would have been Michael. For that reason, as the cannibal moved toward him now, Rourke would not reach for the second Detonics pistol, or the Black Chrome Sting IA. The axe started the downstroke, Rourke side-stepping quickly, wheeling half right, his left leg snapping up and out, a double Tae Kwon Do kick to the left side of the cannibal’s head, the cannibal staggering, not falling. The other two were coming now, screaming something so guttural Rourke couldn’t even be certain the screams were not words, threats, the second cannibal closing. Rourke wheeled again, sidestepping as the stone axe cleaved the air where his head had been, a high sweeping forward kick with his right leg, then wheeling, the same high sweeping kick again, but this time the left leg, this time connecting against the jaw of the second cannibal, the axe flying from his hands. Rourke stepped in, the heel of his left hand hammering up and out, impacting the base of the cannibal’s jaw, his right hand punching forward, the middle knuckles finding the solar plexus—the human skin the cannibal wore over his own was cold, damp to the touch.

The cannibal sagged back, Rourke’s left knee smashing up, hammering into the testicles, but Rourke feeling no squish as the cannibal doubled forward, Rourke sidestepping to avoid the canni-bal’s breath. The body fell. Rourke wheeled, the third cannibal charging, the first man up as well, grabbing his stone axe.

Rourke spun one hundred eighty degrees left, back-kicking the cannibal once, then again in the chest, as Rourke’s right foot settled back to the ground. Rourke’s right fist backhanded the man across the center of the face, the nose shattering, blood spraying on the wind, Rourke wheeling right one hundred eighty degrees, a left hook to the cannibal’s jaw, then backhanding the cannibal across the face again on the backswing.

The third cannibal was too close. Rourke threw himself down to the rock surface, rolling against the cannibal’s shins, the axe flying, the man’s body sailing over him.

Rourke rolled onto his back, both legs coming up, snapping outward and down, Rourke up, to his feet, the second cannibal coming again. Rourke’s right fist snapped outward into the center of the face once, then again, then still again, the cannibal sagging, falling.

Rourke wheeled left, the third cannibal on his feet again, coming, the axe in a giant swing laterally, Rourke wheeling, sidestepping. Rourke reached down to the rock surface, snatching up one of the fallen stone axes—the stones were wound to the wooden shaft with what Rourke recognized as dried and cured human intestines.

Rourke swung the axe upward, blocking the lateral thrust of the cannibal’s axe, Rourke’s right foot snapping forward and up, into the jaw of the cannibal, Rourke backstepping. The axe heads locked, dragging the man forward and down as teeth spit from the cannibal’s cracked and bleeding lips. The cannibal rolled forward, Rourke side-stepping, half wheeling right, Rourke’s left foot snaking out, a fast double kick to the side of the head—he might be killing the man, Rourke realized. The man still moved, another double kick and there was no movement.

The sound of feet against stone, Rourke wheel-ing. The first man, the one who bore the gunshot wound, he was coming, charging, blood covering his face and chest, the axe high over his head.

There was no choice—Rourke swung the axe in his own hands, cleaving the stone head into the right chest cavity of the charging cannibal. The cannibal’s body rocked with it, the cannibal recovering, swinging the axe in a horizontal chop. Rouike blocked it with his own borrowed axe, pulling his opponent off balance. The cannibal swung the axe again, Rourke dodging back, dodging again on the backswing, Rourke’s own axe coming up, powering down, impacting the crown of the skull, a crunching, splitting sound, blood spraying in a pink cloud, then gray—the gray of human brain. The cannibal’s body fell backward, impacting the stone, bouncing, blood spraying upward again, the body rocking, the arms sagging, spread-eagling, still.

The second cannibal, moving quickly now, reaching out for Rourke’s rifle. Rourke didn’t know if the man could use it. He couldn’t gamble. Rourke leaned out on his left leg, taking a half step as he wheeled ninety degrees left, his right leg fully extended forward, his hands and arms bringing the axe down diagonally, impacting the left side of 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 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 air on his flesh. , “Come with me. Do not try to resist/’ one of the anonymous voices called from the darkness.

Michael Rourke had never liked orders, he reflected. His right hand—toward the voice in the dark-ness. His left hand—toward the blindfold which covered his eyes.

The right hand—it found flesh, twisting, rip-ping.

The left hand found cloth—twisting, ripping.

He blinked his eyes tight against the misty light—it was dawn, the sun rising beyond the mouth of the cave, shafts of yellow light like hands across the cave floor as he ripped the flesh of his enemy toward him, his left hand punching forward into the face of the business-suited guard as the man raised the cattle prod in his defense.

The nose—Michael shattered it. Wheeling, back-kicking, his heel found the groin, driving the body back and away from him, his right hand reaching down to find the cattle prod, the other five of them coming for him, closing, Madison, the blindfold pulled from her eyes, screaming,

“Look out, Michael!” Michael sidestepped right, ducking, wheeling— there had been a seventh man. He should have realized—the cattle prod hammered down toward him, but his right hand and left hand held the wooden prod and he rammed his prod back, into the abdomen of the seventh man, doubling him forward. Michael loosed the prod with his left hand, his right still holding the prod, snapping out in a wide arc, across the nose of the nearest of the five men coming for him, the man falling back.

Another prod slicing the air toward him, his right arm going up, blocking the prod with his prod, his body half wheeling left, his right foot snapping up and out, into the abdomen ol his opponent, then his right arm snapping back, hammering the prod across the man’s face, knocking him down. Three remained, two of them starting for him, their prods held like sabers, the ends of the tips glowing hot orange with the electrical pain they could cause. Michael started toward them, hacking the air before their faces with the prod, one of them falling back, Michael wheeling to the second, feigning a strike with the prod, the man dodging, Michael wheeling half right, a double Tae Kwon Do kick to the chest.

The second man—he was driving fast, the prod in both hands to block a blow from the hand or arm. Michael drew his feet together, jumping, upward, his right leg flashing outward, the flat of his combat-booted right foot impacting the prod at the center, the prod splintering, breaking, the man holding it falling backward, losing his balance, regaining it as Michael dropped, his knees springing, taking the fall, the prod still in his own right hand out, aimed toward the face of the man.

The man edged back, Michael thrusting the prod forward, Michael sweeping the, prod left to right, the man’s head bobbing back, Michael wheeling half right, a double Tae Kwon Do kick, the man dodging as Michael had known he would, Michael holding the prod in both hands now, ramming it outward in a straight line for the man’s Adam’s apple, a scream, the smell of burning flesh as the edge of the prod impacted skin, the man caving in, falling back—dead, Michael realized. The last men—he was going through the air lock—to lock them out, to leave them…

for Them. Sounds, guttural, barely human if human at all, from the mouth of the cave.

Michael looked back once, shouting to Madi-son. “Run—for me—hurry!” The ones she called Them were coming.

Michael’s right hand found the coat of the escaping guard, jerking back, the man lunging with his cattle prod, Michael’s prod fallen, Michael’s left hand snapping forward, the heel aimed for the base of the chin. The man ducked—

Michael’s hand impacting the base of the nose, breaking it, driving it up and through the ethmoid bone into the brain.

The air lock door was jammed half open, but the body sagged, Michael throwing his weight against the door—but it closed, a clicking sound as it locked. Michael turned. The mouth of the cave—dozens of the cannibals, their stone axes held high to strike.

Beside him—Madison hugged at his left arm.

Michael reached down to the cattle prod, holding it now in his right balled fist.

His left hand—he found the knife hidden on his left leg.

He clenched the steel in his left hand.

“Stay behind me—won’t let them get you.”

Trapped, the air lock door closed, the cannibals filling the mouth of the cave in greater numbers by the minute. Michael Rourke stood his ground.

“Michael—we—“

“Just stay behind me,” he told her. “Behind me.”

He could see the lust for blood in the eyes of the cannibals as they approached.

Chapter Forty-Two

The panel of rock had slid back into position-it was as if the door into the Place had never existed, Michael Rourke thought. He felt Madison’s hands behind him, touching gently at his neck where his shirt stopped. “Michael—kill me.”

It was the first, time she had used the word. “Make me die.” He looked at her—no longer did she think in terms of “goes”—and as he looked at her, he whispered, “If it comes to that, I won’t let them have you. I love you.” A tear, a solitary tear, left the corner of her right eye and started to journey across her cheek. Then her eyes were rimmed with them. Michael Rourke looked away.

The cannibals, the ones she called Them, the spawn, he realized, of the rigid population control inside the Place, were closing. One of them could have been her father—Madison’s—or her brother. He had seen no cannibal women, which meant there was somewhere a village.

Women, children—children who would grow to become this, he thought.

Survival.

There were some prices too high—the cannibals paid such a price, the ones in the Place paid it as well. Inhumanity had spawned inhumanity. He had left one of the bodies on the ground, the man still alive—for an instant. A stone axe cleaved into the skull. A dozen of the cannibals [ell on the body, snarling, growling, snapping their teeth at each other, dismembering the body, hacking it to pieces, Madison screaming, “Michael!” One of them had the man’s left leg over his shoulder, the leg dripping blood. Another of the cattle-prod-armed guards—this one already dead, his body fallen on by another group of the cannibals, torn, the flesh ripped, one of the cannibals biting into the raw flesh of a human thigh dismembered from the hip joint and from the calf.

The other bodies—Michael edged back with Madison pressed behind him as the other bodies were one after another set upon, torn, some of the cannibals lapping blood from their victims.

One of the cannibals—a human ear being chewed half outside the right corner of his mouth—turned from his meal, staring.

He gestured toward Michael, Michael watching.

There was a grunting sound—another of the cannibals turned, blood dripping from both corners of his mouth.

More of the cannibals turned toward them now, some of their axes catching in the sunlight as it grew to till the cave, red glistening from them, the wetness of human blood.

A cannibal started for him—slowly, his axe raised. As the cannibal lunged, Michael stabbed the cattle prod forward, the hot end impacting the cannibal’s right eye. There was a scream, more hideous sounding then anythingMichael had ever heard and the cannibal fell back, whimpering.

A memory, he wondered, of the pain of the