Ahern, Jerry - The Web

dying, wandering the west Texas desert, herself the victim of Brigand attack. The feelings that had grown between him and the Russian woman, despite her loyalty to her country, despite her job in the KGB, despite her uncle—General Varakov, who was the supreme Soviet commander for the North American Army of Occupation. "Insane," he murmured to himself.

And then another chance meeting. Rourke had been pursuing the trail of his wife, Sarah, and the children, lost to him on the Night of the War. Rourke let out a deep breath, feeling the tendons in his neck tightening with the thoughts. "Sarah," he heard himself whisper. The meeting—the meeting with the girl named Sissy; the seismological research data she had carried regarding the development of an artificial fault line during the bombing, something that would reduplicate the horror of the megaquakes that had destroyed the West Coast, but would instead now sever the Florida peninsula from the mainland.

For all the destruction and the death, it had proven again that there still remained some humanity, some commonality of species. For with President Chambers of U.S. II and General Varakov, a Soviet-U.S. II truce had been struck to effect the evacuation of peninsular Florida in the hope of saving human lives.

The job finished, the truce had ended and a state of war existed once again.

Rourke shook his head. War. Sarah had always labeled his study of survivalism, his knowledge of weapons—all of it—as a preoccupation with gloom and doom, a fascination with the unthinkable. It had torn at their marriage, separated them, and now, despite the fact that they had promised each other to try again for the sake of

Michael and Annie, for the sake of the love he and Sarah had always felt for each other, it was war that had finally separated them.

Rourke remembered it; he hadn't wanted to leave, to give the lecture to be delivered in Canada. Hypothermia—the effects of cold. The world situation had been already tense; but Sarah had insisted, so she could get herself together, to try again with him. It had been there, in Canada, that Rourke had at last learned of the gravity of the situation rapidly developing between the United States and the Soviet Union. He had been aboard an aircraft nearly ready to land in Atlanta, near his farm in northeastern Georgia, when he had heard over the pilot's PA system that the first missiles had been launched. Then that night—the night that had lasted, it seemed, forever, and nothing ever the same afterward.

He shivered from the memories: the crash after the plane had been diverted westward, the struggle to survive afterward with the injured passengers, the useless-ness of his skills as a doctor to the burn victims in Albuquerque—then the slaughter of the passengers by the Brigands.

"Brigands," he murmured. He glanced at his watch; the black-faced Rolex Submariner showed that he had been lost in his reverie for at least ten minutes, perhaps longer. He checked the instruments, then the ground below him—now a nuclear desert, a no man's land where once millions had lived, worked, tilled the soil—nothing now. Not a living tree, or a blade of grass that wasn't brown or black.

His cigar was gone from his teeth and he checked the ashtray, realizing he'd extinguished it. Rourke shook his head, silent—tired. . . .

Reed started to stub out his cigarette, but didn't. Cigarettes were getting harder to find. He kept smoking it, then looked up across the littered table from his cup of coffee. "What, Corporal?"

"Captain, your pal, Dr. Rourke—he's gonna have trouble, sir."

"He had trouble—remember? Hell of a lot of good we were to stop it." He looked back at the cigarette and noticed that the skin of his first and second fingers was stained dark orange. Reed wondered what the stuff in the cigarettes did to his lungs. He shrugged and took another drag; then through a mouthful of smoke, he said, "What kind of trouble? He's got a radio. We can contact him."

"A storm system—it just moved in, like it was out of nowhere, sir."

"He's a fine pilot. He'll fly over it," Reed answered, dismissing the problem.

"But, Captain?"

Reed looked up at the red-haired young woman again. "What, Corporal?"

"You don't understand, sir," she insisted. "See. It's a massive winter storm system—it was just there. You

know the weather's been crazy—"

"Winter storm system? Have you weather people ever figured out you can learn a hell of a lot by just looking out the damn window?" Reed checked his wrist watch, thinking of Rourke for an instant and envying Rourke the Rolex he habitually wore. "An hour ago it was in the sixties—snowstorm?"

"Sir . . . please," the red-haired woman said.

"Yeah." He nodded, tired from going more than a day without sleep.

Standing slowly, he stubbed out the cigarette and looked around the place—some officer's club, he thought. One lousy window. He walked across the room, lurching a little because of sitting so long in one chair, tired. He staggered against the back of a chair. A Marine lieutenant started to his feet, saw Reed, then looked noncommittal. Reed shrugged it off, reaching the window. "I need a good couple hours sleep, Corporal."

"Yes, sir." The red-haired woman nodded.

Reed pulled back the heavy curtain. Staring outside, he whispered, "Holy shit!" He judged the depth, at least four inches of snow; a heavy wind was blowing what had fallen back into the air. Drifts were mounting against the tires of a jeep outside by the walkway.

"Yes, sir. That's it, sir," the red-haired woman echoed.

Reed looked at her. "It's impossible! It was like spring a few—"

He looked back out the window. It was no longer like spring.

The sleet was coming in torrents now. Sarah huddled beside the children under the overhang of rocks, a pine bracken to her right, as she stared down into the valley. The pines made a natural windbreak for herself, Michael, Annie, and the horses.

Across her lap, resting on her blue-jeaned thighs instead of the children's heads, was the AR-—the one modified to fire fully automatically when she put the selector at the right setting, the one almost used to kill her the morning after the Night of the War, the one she'd taken from the dead Brigand and used to shoot out the glass window in the basement of her house in order to set off the confined natural gas there after the gas lines had begun filling the house following the bombing—to blow up her own home and the men inside it who had tried to rob, to kill, to rape.

Priorities were odd, she thought, as she raised her left hand from Annie's chest where it had rested and tugged the blue-and-white bandanna from her own hair. Before the Night of the War—rape, it would have been a top priority. But now losing things had somehow become unconsciously more important as she considered life.

Rape would be a horror—but it could be overcome. Death—it might well be more than expected. But to be robbed, deprived of food or horses or weapons with which to fight—this was worse than death, and rape of the spirit more foul than any rape of the body.

She looked to her right. Michael was sleeping, his body swathed—like Annie's—in blankets against the bizarre and sudden cold. Michael would be turning eight soon, and already he had murdered a man—a Brigand who had tried to rape her. \par She studied his face. It was John's face, but younger, though appearing no less troubled. She could see the faint tracing of lines which in adulthood would duplicate the lines in the face of his father. She could see the set of his chin. She thought of his father's face, the quiet, the resoluteness, the firmness. She found herself missing that—the steadiness with which John Rourke's infrequent life at home had provided her.

She watched the valley, the impromptu-appearing Brigand encampment there, pickup trucks sheltered with tarps, and motorcycles, these, too, covered—covered better than her children.