Ahern, Jerry - The Savage Horde

"Ya'll git tired a runnin', woman?"

"Maybe," she gasped, nodding.

"Hey—maybe I like my women when they skin sweats—maybe I'll just put me a rope 'round yo neck and

run ya awhiles, huh? See how ya like it and git ya t'beg me maybe to stop. Maybe offer me something good, huh?"

Sarah said nothing.

The man dismounted the bike, the engine still throbbing. She had ridden a bike with John but counted herself no expert. But only two hundred, maybe two hundred and fifty yards to the house—it as her only prayer.

The brigand, his face dripping dirty sweat, the sweat running in brown rivulets along his neck and hair-covered chest, stopped, less than a yard from her. He reached out his right hand—she felt it explore her neck, start to knot into her hair.

She took a single step, closer to him, thrusting both hands up and outward into his eyes, the sandy dirt powdering through her splayed fingers, the man starting to scream. Her nails were too short for it, but she dug them into the eyes, the man grabbing at her as she smashed her bare right knee up into his crotch.

There was a pistol—she felt it as he sagged against her—and she snatched it from his waistband. She almost lost the gun, the grips sweaty and wet. An automatic.

She lifted the pistol into her left hand as she stepped back, the man screaming, pawing at her as he sank to his knees. Her right hand worked back the slide, her eyes catching sight of the flicker of brass in the sunlight—there had already been a round chambered.

The two closest bikers were starting toward her.

She let the slide go forward and fired, the pistol bucking in her hands, but the shot low. She didn't see it impact. She fired again, the nearest biker less than two yards from her.

She saw the explosion of blood on his upper chest just under the hollow of the neck.

She stepped back, firing again at the second biker, the man's right arm leaving the handlebars, the right hand

grasping at the abdomen, the bike starting to go down.

There was a hand on her ankle, dragging her down. As she fell forward, she fired again, the pistol discharging point blank into the face of the first man still on the ground.

The hand was still locked on her ankle. She fired the pistol—it was a . but smaller than her husband's gun somehow. The shot impacted into the forearm, the hand's grip on the bare flesh of her ankle loosening.

She tripped, caught herself and fired a wild shot toward the remainder of the brigand force, the men halfway across the field, some on bikes, some on foot, some pickup trucks coming behind them, packed with men "and some women—all armed.

The first brigand's bike was the only one still standing near her, the engine still pulsing loudly. She ran for it, straddling it, her underpants feeling the wetness of sweat on the saddle as the wind gusted, billowing her skirt.

She fumbled the controls, hoping she wouldn't by accident shut the machine off.

It started to lurch ahead, the pistol thrown down because she didn't have any place to hold it, her fists locked white-knuckle tight on the handlebars, the machine too powerful for her, she realized, the movement of the fork as she started across the field tearing at her muscles, making her shoulders ache.

She wasn't sure she knew how to stop it.

There was gunfire coming from the house—either Mary Mulliner or the hired man Mary had taken in—perhaps Michael. "Michael," she gasped. Were Michael and Annie still in the house?

She heard the light, intermittent reports of the AR-—whoever was firing the gun didn't know how to handle it, wasn't as good as—"As good as I am," she screamed into the wind.

She could hear the brigand bikes all around her behind her.

She kept moving, out of the field and across the yard now, the house looming up ahead of her coming fast—too fast.

She started trying to find the brakes, the machine slowing but not fast enough.

She was losing it. She gave the brakes all she had and threw herself from the machine as it skidded in the grass near the back door leading to the kitchen.

She rolled, her hands and knees tearing on the dirt and gravel mixed in with the grass. She rolled again, the biker nearest behind her sailing up into the air, his bike going out of control as it bounced over the bike she'd jumped clear of.

The man's body was still in the air, there was a scream. The body hammered through the kitchen window over the sink.

Sarah pushed herself up, a biker starting for her. The washbasket was beside her. She threw it at him. He kept coming. She was running, toward the back door.

A rake—the heavy one with the long metal tines that Mary used for her, vegetable garden on the side of the house—leaned by the kitchen door.

Sarah reached for it, grabbed it, the biker closing.

She swung the rake, the tines catching the brigand biker full in the face.

There was a scream and she thought she felt blood spraying her hands and arms.

The biker collapsed from his machine.

Sarah half threw herself up the steps and through the doorway.

Mary was firing the AR-.

"Give it to me!" Sarah snatched it from Mary's hands, ramming the flash deflectored muzzle through a pane of unbroken glass.

Two shot semiautomatic bursts—she started firing. One biker down, another biker.

"Sarah!"

She heard the scream. She turned. The biker who'< sailed through the window was conscious, starting t< crawl up from the sink top, reaching for a pistol.

Sarah grabbed the butcher knife on the counter am hammered it down—into the back of the biker's neck. Tru brigand was dead, blood gushing out of his open moutl past his tongue.

She looked at the far kitchen wall—Michael and Annii and the little Jenkins girl.

"Michael—keep low—get my rifle and my pistol from upstairs—hurry—then find anything else you can."

She didn't wait for an answer, pumping more shots a the brigands streaming into the yard.

' 'Mary—search that dead man for guns an< ammunition—we'll need it all!"

Sarah—she thought of it as she pulled the trigger for j fast shot on a brigand biker, seeing the man's hands fly t< his face where she'd shot him. She had changed.

Chapter 18

He had lost all sense of day and night—he awoke now, realizing that on the East Coast where he had last seen land it would be mid-morning. He frowned at the luminous dial of the Rolex, then sat up in the darkness.

A nuclear submarine—he tried recalling how much actual time had gone by. Not expert when it came to submarines, he wondered if they had gone under the ice yet. He doubted it though.

Sarah and the children—somewhere in Georgia or the Carolinas, perhaps as far as Alabama or Mississippi, or perhaps again up in Tennessee.

"Up in Tennessee," he laughed.

He reached over and flipped on the light. He rubbed his stubbled cheeks—he needed a shave, badly—and he could smell his own body.

"All right," he mumbled to himself, sighing heavily. It was time to do something.

John Rourke stood up. "Time to do something," he murmured ...

He felt naked as he walked the companionway looking for Paul Rubenstein—no guns.

It was the first time since the Night of The War—except for periods of captivity under the Russians and the problem with the woman in the town who had chosen suicide—that he had been without them. As he turned what he would have called a corner, his hair still wet from the shower, picking his way over the lintel of one of the myriad watertight doors, an officer—a lieutenant JG stopped him.

"You're Doctor Rourke?"

"Yes," Rourke nodded.

"The captain requested that you join him on the bridge, sir. I can take you there."

Rourke nodded again, falling into step behind the young man. "How is the Soviet major doing, sir?"