The End is Coming

Chapter Forty

Rourke had been there before— he had lectured there once to more than a hundred police officers. Before The Night of The War it had been a public shooting range and gunshop, before that a skating rink. The sign had fallen, was gone—but he knew the place anyway. Waukegan Outdoor Sports-man. He stopped at the rear metal door, Emily tap-ping out some sort of code as she knocked. A peephole had been cut in the steel door, and Rourke saw a tiny shaft of light in the gathering darkness—it was near sunset—when the peephole opened.

And then the peephole closed, the sound of metal scraping against metal, perhaps a security bar being lifted, and the door opened.

Emily stepped through, Rourke going ahead of Natalia, following Emily and, as he glanced back quickly, Dumbrowski and two other men follow-ing after.

There were no lights, and in the darkness—gray, indefinite, he could hear the door being closed behind them. A curtain—black, heavy, was ripped back and beyond the curtain burned dim ceiling lights. In a far corner of what had appar-ently been a shipping area, he heard the hum of a generator. He could smell its fumes.

It was cold in the building, and he followed Em-ily past new faces, eyes staring at them—Rourke tried to smile. No one smiled back. As they walked, Rourke rasped under his breath to Nata-lia, falling in beside her as he slowed his pace, “Let me do the talking—please.”

She looked at him, her blue eyes flashing—but she nodded, blinking her eyes closed for an instant as she did—it was like the light flickered out of the world when she closed them, he thought. They passed through a storage area—there were weapons of all descriptions on tables and on the floors, most disassembled. Reloading presses were in operation, children attending them. As they walked on, two men appeared, one older, one young, both men going to one of the tables, com-mencing to work on one of the firearms there.

They passed into what Rourke remembered had been the sales floor of the retail store—it was now a hospital, apparently.

“How many people have been treated here?” Rourke asked Emily Bronkiewicz.

“Maybe a thousand since The Night of The War. We have some real doctors, and we have a lot of volunteers. Some of the tougher cases—well, they can’t do anything for them. My hus-band—he was one of ‘em,” and her eyes flickered to Natalia, but this time the woman smiled. The woman started up a flight of stairs, Rourke going ahead of Natalia again, following Emily. As they climbed the stairs, he could overlook the vast square footage—he estimated more than a hun-dred beds in use, crammed together with barely enough room to walk between. And few of them were beds—most were mats, some packing boxes.

The woman turned down a small corridor, past open office doors, men inside the offices, some-times a face looking up, then quickly turning away.

She stopped at the last office, the door open.

A man perhaps Rourke’s own age, perhaps a lit-tle younger, looked up from a paper-littered desk. His face lit up with a smile beneath his close-cropped, light-colored, curly hair. His eyes seemed to radiate a good humor Rourke had seen in none of the other men or women of the local Resistance. And Rourke re-membered the man. “It’s Maus, isn’t it?”

“Tom Maus,” the man said, rising from his seat, extending his right hand, Rourke took it. “And you’re—John Rourke, right? The M.D. who taught survivalism and weapons training—I re-member the presentation you gave.”

“That’s right,” Rourke nodded. He watched Maus’s eyes as they took in Natalia.

“And you, miss—I know your face, too—it’s Major Tiemerovna of the KGB—mistress or maybe the wife of Karamatsov before he was killed.”

“Wife,” Rourke heard Natalia answer—life-lessly.

“I guess that’s kind of a negative way of starting a conversation, though, isn’t it—I didn’t mean anything by it. Before the war I used to think I was busy— Reserves, running the shop here, the wholesaling business—hell, I wish I had that much free time now. I get a little testy when I’m tired. Why don’t we all sit down.”

Rourke looked at Natalia—her face seemed to show that she had relaxed—if only a little.

“Emily,” Maus said. “Good to see you’re still alive—” and Maus grinned as he looked at Rourke. “Her husband was one of the best field people I had—and she’s better. But I still miss him. I’d offer you coffee but I don’t like poisoning people—and the pop machine never worked that well before The Night of The War and anyway we ran out of pop.”

“We’re fine,” Rourke nodded.

He noticed Maus looking at Natalia, and then Maus spoke. “I know a lot about you, major— heard through U.S. II all the scuttlebutt about what you did in Florida during the quakes. And I also know through our sources—we have some spies who take a lot of risks and sometimes get us pretty good information—so I know that the KGB has you on some kind of hit list—wants you dead. Why, I don’t know. So,” Maus looked at Rourke then. “Like I said—nothin’ I like better than re-newing old acquaintances, but I’ve got a field hos-pital to run, a weapons repair shop, a reloading operation—”

“What’s where the range used to be?” Rourke asked him, interrupting. “More beds?”

“No—we can’t accommodate the people we have out on the floor down there—no. Since it’s soundproofed, we use it as a training area, a test-ing area for the weapons we repair—everything it needs to be used for—and a few other things be-sides. But like I said, if I had twelve hands, I still wouldn’t have a thumb to twiddle—so why are you both here? Something for U.S. II or what?”

Rourke shrugged, saying to Natalia as he looked at her, “You explain it—all of it. We can trust this man.”

Natalia’s eyes—they seemed to look into his soul, Rourke thought, but then she turned to look at Maus.

“My uncle is General Varakov, the su-preme commander—”

“I sort of figured he was some kind of relative of yours—go ahead.”

And, gradually, she told Tom Maus everything.