The End is Coming

Chapter Twenty-three

She drove the truck, tears in her eyes, Annie sit-ting—quietly—beside her. Ahead of her was John Rourke, riding behind him on the Harley-Davidson sat Michael, Mi-chael’s hair blowing in the wind, as was her hus-band’s—Michael was his miniature—in almost all ways. In the side-view West Coast mirror—cracked by a bullet—she could see them standing there, Pete Critchfield, Tom, Mary Mulliner—the others.

Sarah Rourke looked down at her T-shirt—she had changed back into her normal clothes after the gunfight, no time for sleep, for rest—only time to prepare for the trek to the Retreat. Pinned to the front of her T-shirt—she felt at once stupid and proud—was a Silver Star. The medal had been given Pete Critchfield’s son who had died years earlier in the Viet Nam War. Pete, pinning it to her T-shirt, startling her as he’d reached for her, had said, “Sarah—this war, well—we don’t have no medals, nothin’ for brav-ery. Like you’ve been ever since we met you. You hadn’t killed those first coupla Brigand bikers last night, no tellin’ if n they’d have got down into the bunker and maybe killed us all—or a lot of us, leastwise. So—my boy won it, then got blown up by one of them mortar attacks—near the DMZ. So—it’s your medal now—earned it just as much as he did, I reckon,” and he had kissed her.

She looked down at the medal again.

She didn’t need the Silver Star to remember Pete Critchfield, or Mary Mulliner’s husband’s pistol to remember young Bill who had given it to her.

She would remember David Balfry. The black man, Tom. Curley, the radio specialist. Mary Mulliner—remember them all, her family for a while.

Until her dying day.

She upshifted as she finished the turn out of the burned-down quarter horse farm. The Cunningham place.