The End is Coming

Chapter Four

The M-16’s thirty-round magazine spent, she let the rifle fall on its sling, dismissing it as she leaned her weight forward over the Harley, tucking her body down against the gunfire of the pursuing Brigands. Paul Rubenstein was ahead of her, his machine weaving—perhaps to avoid Brigand gunfire, per-haps the pain in his arm making him weak. She didn’t know.

Natalia kept riding.

There was a roar behind her and she looked back.

One of the Brigand bikers—he was breaking away from the rest, a three-wheeled trike, the roar of its engine loud. She stared at the machine. From what she could tell it was no real bike at all—something customized, hand built, chrome pipes gleaming every-where, a chrome-plated auto-mobile-sized engine between the single front wheel and the rear wheels, just behind the driver’s seat. There was a rippling, exploding sound, the bike up on its rear wheels for an instant, then rocketing toward her, a cloud of exhaust fumes rising in its wake.

The face of the man driving it—lips wide back from the bared teeth, snarling, one eye gone, the right one. In the left hand she saw a shotgun, the barrels short, no buttstock at all, as far as she could see. The double side-by-side barrels were raising to-ward her as the three-wheeled machine gained on her. Natalia reached her right hand to the Safariland flap holster at her right hip, her fingers curling around the smooth, memory-grooved Goncalo Alves stocks, the L-Frame Smith & Wesson in her fist as she wrenched it from the leather.

She punched the Metalife Custom .357 Mag-num out, toward the man with the shotgun com-ing at her on the trike. If he fired first—she would be dead or worse, she knew. She double-actioned the slab-side barreled revolver, the wheelgun bucking in her right hand, the face of the Brigand biker seeming to erupt at the bridge of the nose and between the eyes. The shotgun discharged, both barrels, Natalia turning her face away, hear-ing a roar then a roar louder than the shotgun blasts had been, feeling heat sear at her right hand. She turned to fire again—but the trike, the biker, a massive oak tree growing close out of the side of the road—the bizarre machine had climbed it, hung from it now as flames rained down in chunks of burning flesh and debris and the trike and the biker who had ridden it were gone. She holstered the L-Frame, one of two given her by the de facto President of U.S. II, Samuel Chambers—in her mind’s eye she could see the American Eagles engraved on the right barrel flats, remember the look in Rourke’s eyes as Chambers had awarded her the guns, his token of thanks—

She was Russian, fighting Americans, fighting Russians, too, by hiding from them—at war with her own KGB—at war with her own heart.

Natalia screamed into the wind—

The Brigand bikers had given up their pursuit.