Ahern, Jerry - The Nightmare begins

The rain was heavy now, falling in sheets, blowing across the muddy surface of the field. Rourke's hair and face were wet, and he blinked the rain away from his eyelashes, knowing what would happen.

Deke's pansy-blue eyes set hard; the left hand with the glove for fanning was twitching. Rourke dove right, into the mud, his right hand streaking toward the Detonics .45 under his left armpit, his first wrapping around the checkered rubber Pachmayr grips, the stainless pistol ripping from the leather. Deke's sixgun was out, his left hand streaking back faster than Rourke could see clearly, the big revolver belching fire and roaring like a grenade going off near his ears. Rourke hit the mud and rolled, the Detonics in his right hand firing once, then once again, the first round thudding into Deke's midsection, splitting through the left forearm as the gun fanned its third shot, punching through the arm and into the blonde-haired man's gut. The blonde-haired man wheeled, dropping to one knee in the mud, a trickle of blood from the left corner of his mouth as he heaved forward, Rourke's second shot impacting into Deke's chest as the single action in Deke's hand—thumb cocked—fired, the bullet spitting into the mud less than three feet in front of him.

Rourke fired the Detonics a third time, the 185-grain jacketed hollow point punching into Deke's head, almost dead square between the eyes. The head snapped back, the body lurched forward and sagged into the mud.

Rourke got to his feet, mud dripping from his shirt and Levis, the heavy rain now washing around him in a torrent. Natalie was beside him—he could feel her hands on his left arm. He walked forward, toward the body in the mud.

Deke—Rourke edged the body over with the toe of his boot. The body rolled, the gunhand slapped into the mud, the revolver fell from it. The pansy-blue eyes were wide open, the head cracked up the forehead—the eyes were just staring though as the rain fell against them, and for a moment Rourke could do nothing but stare down into them himself. He had kept his promise to the woman with the dead infant.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Rourke sat behind the wheel of the pickup truck, the windows barely cracked open for air, the rain driving down with almost unbelievable force. Rain still dripped from his hair, and the girl beside him and Rubenstein on the far passenger side were wet as well. The brigand force would be moving out and now Rourke, Rubenstein and Natalie were a part of it. One of the brigand outriders had returned in the aftermath of the gunfight. The paramils were now closer than Rourke or any of the brigands had thought them to be, and it was imperative now that the brigands head to safety and put as much distance as possible between themselves and the paramils while they found a secure site for the battle lines to be drawn.

The brigand leader, Mike, had rejected Rourke's offer to stitch his lower lip and stem the flow of blood. Rourke had shrugged and turned and walked back into the truck. Rourke had watched then, as eventually some of Deke's comrades had dragged his body from the mud. He'd watched too, as the townspeople were released. Wet, dirty, bedraggled and terrified, they had slunk past the pickup truck, some turning and quickly eyeing Rourke, then all of them starting to run as they'd headed out of the circle of trucks—alive. But Rourke had wondered if they were really better off now—the new world that had taken shape after the night of the war was a violent one, and Rourke knew that many of them would not survive. Some would die because they could not cope with the violence, some would perhaps eventually revel in it and become brigands themselves. Silently, he'd wondered how his own wife and two children were faring—were they even still alive? He felt the pressure of Natalie's hand on his and stared out into the rain…

By evening, the rain was still falling and the weather had turned cold. Twice during the afternoon, one of the massive fuel tanker trucks had stopped and some of the bikes had refueled. Rourke had counted one, possibly two trucks loaded with gasoline and at least three trucks loaded with Diesel, he guessed—enough to keep the brigand army rolling for prolonged periods away from the remains of civilization. During the middle of the afternoon, one of the few brigand outriders brave enough to keep to his bike in the driving rain had pulled alongside Rourke in the pickup truck and shouted up that Mike, the brigand leader, had changed his mind on the stitches. Rourke had pulled off along the shoulder and passed the bulk of the truck caravan and then pulled alongside Mike's truck. The caravan had stopped then and Rourke, using improvised materials, had stitched together the lip. There was no anesthesia available, and Mike just consumed more of the whiskey he had been drinking ever since the fight in order to control his pain. The inside of the eighteen-wheeler trailer was fitted with a collection of sofas and reclining chairs and beds—things obviously stolen from all the towns along their route. And the walls of the eighteen wheeler were lined with weapons as well. If the other trucks were anything like the one Mike occupied, Rourke decided, the brigand force would decidedly defeat the paramils when the eventual confrontation came.

Rourke had asked the woman attending Mike— apparently his wife or mistress—what was the convoy's destination, and she'd confided that it was a massive plateau some fifty or sixty miles further out into the desert, with one road leading up only, defendable against almost any size army without air support—or at least Mike believed that. As Rourke finished the stitching and told the woman how to make Mike more comfortable, then started to leave, the woman had stopped him, saying, "Hey—whatever your name is."

"John Rourke," he'd told her.

"Well—John Rourke—listen. You did my man a good turn so I'll do you one—there's a kind of rule around here—any snatch that ain't claimed at night is open property for anyone in the camp. So you or the little guy had better be sleepin'

with that chick you brought in with you, or you're gonna have a fight on your hands. There's almost twice as many guys as there's women around for 'em. You get what I mean?"

Rourke nodded, asking, "How'd you get teamed up with Mike over there?" He looked over her shoulder and saw the brigand leader dozing now in an alcoholic stupor.

"They hit my town, two nights after the war— weren't many of 'em then. Killed my ma and pa and said he'd kill me if I didn't treat him good. So I treated him good—we're kinda attached now, see," the woman told him.

Rourke said, "Doesn't it bother you how you got that way?"

"He coulda killed me too, I figure—so I owe him something."

Rourke looked hard at the woman, saying, his voice a whisper, "Yeah—and you know what you owe him, too, I think—right at the back of your mind somewhere. One of those bayonets over there in his kidney. Think about it. How old are you, anyway?"

"Seventeen," she said.

"You look at yourself in a mirror lately?" Rourke turned and walked to the partially open back door of the truck. The rain was streaming in, the floor boards were wet. Rourke had jumped down to the mud and snapped his coat collar up, then started back to the truck.

The drive had gone on then, and now as they slowly pulled into a circle for the evening camp, the rain heavier even than during the day, Rourke stared out into the darkness beyond his headlights. It had been hard to judge the height of the plateau, but the crude road leading up to it had been steep and narrow, and if Mike's woman had been right, the brigand leader's estimate of the defensive posture he would now have hadn't been off. All that needed defending was the narrow road itself, and a half-dozen well-armed men could have held the road against twenty times that number of equally well-armed attackers.