The Quest

Chapter 4

“There’re brigands all over here,” Rourke said, his voice low. His eyes squinted behind the sunglasses against the bright morning sunlight.

“Do you think they found your retreat, John?” young Paul Rubenstein asked, pushing his wire-framed glasses back from his nose, his face perspiring profusely.

Rourke thought a moment, then said, “No, that’s the least of my worries. Maybe an archeologist will find it a thousand years from now, but nobody’s going to find it today, tomorrow, or twenty years from now. Trouble is—” Rourke looked past Rubenstein and beyond the rocks where the bodies of the brigands they had killed lay—“I wonder if twenty years from now I’m still going to be living in it.” “What do you mean, John?”

Rourke lit one of his small cigars, thinking momentarily about the cigars he had stored at the retreat. “What I mean, Paul, is the world—you look at the sunsets, the sunrises, the way the weather has been hot one day, cold the next, the rains, the winds? And if the world stays in one piece, what happens then? Can we rebuild? There are so many questions. Not enough of them have answers and the ones that do are tough answers.” Rourke stopped talking and looked down at the Colt Python. He’d reloaded the other guns and now slipped the spent cartridges, identifying them from the primer indentations from the cylinder and replacing them with some of the loose rounds he carried. He stood up from the crouch and stretched, snatching up the CAR-15 and slinging it under his right shoulder.

“But,” Rourke continued with a sigh, “as somebody once said out of frustration and bitter experience, life goes on, hmm?” Rourke, without waiting for Paul, started walking across the flat expanse at the top of the rock cluster toward where he and the still recuperating Rubenstein had hauled the younger man’s bike that previous night. Rourke scanned the ground below. In the darkness they had manhandled the bike up into the rocks, but now, with the light, Rourke saw a path—precarious, but he judged it manageable. “You wait here,” he said, looking back over his shoulder toward Rubenstein.

Rourke picked his way across the rocks and stopped beside the bike, then looked back toward the path, and reassessed his judgment that the bike could be driven down. He glanced at the Rolex on his left wrist, then at the sun. With the gunfire ceased and the brigands not having returned to the larger force Rourke felt they were a part of, he decided it was only a matter of time before someone came—perhaps a heavily armed brigand force.

Rourke did not want that. He was too close to the retreat to waste the time, he thought, and eager to begin searching for Sarah and the children. He smiled, “eager.” From the night he had stood talking with the RCMP Inspector in Canada and the man’s wife had turned on the radio newsbroadcast, Rourke had been more than eager. When he took the first flight out to Atlanta, the bombing and missile strikes had begun. In the long night after the plane was diverted and before the crash of the jetliner in New Mexico—and in the long days and nights since—Rourke had thought of little else than finding his family.

He had resolved early on to be unwavering on one point—that somehow they had survived. And they had. As he mounted the bike and started the engine, the corners of his mouth turned down in a bitter smile. He looked out across the land from the high ground. If Sarah and the children were somewhere in the mountains of northern Georgia, they would be hard to find. Were they somewhere else in Georgia, the Carolinas, perhaps Tennessee? Every mile they traveled likely took them farther away, he realized, making the search just that much longer and more difficult.

Finding a woman and two young children, refugees in a country full of refugees—The entire midsection of the country was a radioactive desert. There was no law. What of the Russians, the brigands—God knew what that lay out there? Rourke revved the bike, squinted against the sun and, using his combat booted feet to support the machine rumbling between his legs, started it down the path.