The Nightmare begins

Chapter Thirty-Two

Rourke hadn't caught the name of the town as he, Natalie and Rubenstein had passed it. There was smoke trailing in a wide black line across the sky from where the town should have been, and Rourke thought silently that likely the town was no longer there. There was gunfire discernible in the distance and faint, almost ghostly sounds, Rourke mentally labeled them, that could either have been the wind or human screams. The brigands had turned back out of the desert early that morning, placing Rourke, Rubenstein and the girl sandwiched between the brigands and the paramils, now perhaps a day's march or less apart.

Rourke braked the light blue pickup truck on the top of a rise, out of years of driving habit pulling onto the shoulder and out of the main northeastern-bound lanes, despite the fact that there was no traffic.

Rourke cut the engine and stepped out, stretching after the long ride, watching the dark clouds moving in from the northwest. Already the breeze, which had been hot that morning, was turning cool, and he shivered slightly as he walked to the edge of the road shoulder and stared over the guard rail toward the remains of the town. Below the level of the smoke, there were large dust clouds from vehicles—many of them, Rourke reflected.

"Are they down there?"

Rourke turned around, bracing his right hand against the butt of the Python on 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 emotionally—they sort of revert to savages and along with that goes all the rest 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 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."

The big man started forward and Rourke, the cigar back in his mouth, took a step 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, almost whispering so Taco alone could hear him, "You know how some guys—" Rourke panted, "how some guys have a glass jaw—me, I'm just the opposite." Taco's left flashed forward again and Rourke let it come, dodging his head right just before impact, feeling the rush of air as the bloodied knuckles passed his face, then straight-arming Taco with his own left fist, then crossing with his right, then his left, then his right, hammering the brigand back, forcing him to his knees, then feigning a low right, but instead, hammering up with his right knee, catching Taco on the tip of the chin and snapping the head and neck back with an audible crack.

Rourke stepped away as Mike climbed to his feet, his lower lip split wide, blood and teeth spitting from his mouth as he tried to stand. Rourke lashed out with his left foot, catching Mike square in the face over the nose and driving him back to the ground.

Rourke wheeled, feeling, sensing rather than seeing or hearing, Kleiger coming for him. It was too late to step away, and as Kleiger's right foot punched toward Rourke's crotch, Rourke blocked the blow with both hands crossed in front of him, the scissor formed by his wrists and forearms taking its force.

Kleiger's right heel of the hand was driving up for Rourke's nose, and Rourke wheeled, his left elbow coming up and knocking the blow aside, then his left hand snapping back and downward into the side of Kleiger's neck, Rourke's right already drawn back and driving forward, the middle knuckles of the hand bunched together and hammering into the base of Kleiger's nose, and rather than driving the bone upward into the brain, withdrawing, snapping back, leaving Kleiger stunned, reeling, no guard to block the series of short left jabs Rourke hammered now toward Kleiger's jaw. As Kleiger stumbled, Rourke crossed Kleiger's jaw with a go-for-broke right and the man fell, straight back, stiff, his head snapping hard against the dirt of the field, bouncing a little.

Rourke stood, waiting. Mike was moving on the ground, but not getting up. Taco was down for the count, Rourke felt, as was Kleiger.

"Natalie," Rourke shouted, perhaps a half-dozen feet from her, extending his left hand, watching as the CAR-15's sling slipped from her shoulder and the gun sailed from her right hand and toward him. He caught the rifle, shifting it into his right hand as he worked the safety off, his right fist wrapped around the pistol grip, as a dozen or so of the brigands started toward him in a rush. But Rourke heard a grunting sound, almost not human. Mike, the brigand leader, was on his knees, gesturing rapidly with his right hand, starting to talk, still spitting teeth and blood into the dirt, as the rain fell now in a thin mist, the clouds above them now darkening like the clouds in the northwest had been. The rain felt good against Rourke's body, the dirt and sweat intermingled there with spattered blood from the men he'd fought down.

"Wait!" Mike finally shouted. "He won—it was fair. Could've killed Kleiger—I saw—"

Mike gestured to some of the brigand men and women standing near him and a group of them hauled him to his feet and Rourke lowered the muzzle of the CAR-15 as they approached.

"I been thinkin'," Mike said, his speech hard to understand, the smashed teeth and the cracked lips having resulted in a lisplike effect. He was less than two yards from Rourke now. He started to speak again. "I been thinkin'—maybe you don't like to kill. So I got one more test—some stakes. You make it this time, you're in—but I don't think you're gonna make it."

Rourke looked at Mike, his voice low, saying, "You better hope I do—I'm a doctor and if somebody doesn't put some stitches into that lower lip of yours, you're gonna bleed to death."

Mike's eyes flickered, but he said nothing, then, "I want you to brace Deke—with guns."

"Who's Deke?" the girl said, before Rourke could answer.

Mike's eyes smiled a moment, then the brigand leader said, "He's my right-hand man—and he's so good with a piece you wouldn't believe your eyes, lady."

"Where is he?" Rourke asked.

"Right here," the voice answered and Rourke slowly turned to his right. There was a slim, blonde-haired man with a little imperial on his chin and pansy-blue eyes standing at the edge of the circle of brigands. Rourke's mind flashed back to the description the refugee woman had given of the man who'd shot her baby.

This was the man. And on his right hip in a cut-away Hollywood-style fast-draw rig was a glinting, nickel-plated single-action revolver, the hammer spur built up, the butt canted rearward, muzzle forward. A heavy leather glove covered the man's left hand. Rourke knew the drill—he'd tried competitive fast-draw, had had good friends who competed in the sport. And he knew the light-speed draws a trained fast-draw man could make. "You want it now, or you wanna clean up so you make a good-lookin' corpse?" Deke said, an Aussie-style camouflage cowboy hat low over his eyes.

"Catch you in five," Rourke said and turned away.