Survivalist - 21.5 - The Legend (27 page)

“We have vast expanses of land within what was the United States. land which can bear life, be productive. There is industry to restart, building to do. For all of that, we need people. You must believe me, Akiro,” Dodd said, nodding his head, smiling, “making a new world order is my ultimate goal. I know you’ve said that encouraging new thinking is just what we need. Well, I took that to heart. And with the returnees from Mid-Wake planning to move here to the western regions, well, it just seemed natural that this land should become an international homeland for all of humanity. My ambitions, however you interpreted them, however personal they may have seem, were other oriented, aimed at accomplishing the goal of rebuilding our planet in the most expeditious way possible. I hope you’ll come to see that someday-in fact, Mr. President-I know you will, that the goals I outlined had a purpose greater than anyone imagined.

“I’m here to say,” Dodd concluded, “that you can count on me to work for a new order with all my energies.”

Akiro Kurinami leaned back and smiled.

Commander Christopher Dodd just smiled.

Two

Michael Rourke swung down out of the saddle, dropped to one knee and traced the outline of the horseshoe print with his finger in the dust. Is it the same shoe, Michael?”

“Cast off a litde with a deformed nail head. Yeah.” Michael Rourke stood and stretched. He stared toward the setting sun, but averted his eyes slightly, the glare bothering him. He was stiff and tired from hor-sebaclting through these wastelands where once there was rain forest and now there was encroaching oesert.

Pauls saddle creaked and he stepped down, rubbing his backside a litde. The Germans have a plan for this place.”

Michael Rourke smiled. “Yes, they have a plan for everything, God bless them. Use plasma energy to melt sections of the mountain snows and bring waer back to the land so the trees they want to plant will grow.”

“All I know is that Fm tired of the air everywhere being as thin as something at the top of a mountain.”

“It’s even thinner there,” Michael agreed. Whenthey hadattackedthe Nazi redoubt, part of the reason for the gas masks was that they were connected to small compressed oxygen units which bled in a richer mixture to their normal air supply. Otherwise, unused to the horribly thin air at the higher altitudes, they would have been incapable of sustained physical exertion. “Maybe their plan will work, at least to start.”

Paul bent over to stare at the hoofprints on the ground. “Still six sets. Has to be Nazis, to be out here.”

“Has to be,” Michael agreed.

But, as he looked up, he noticed Paul Rubenstein was no longer looking at the footprints, but was looking at him. “What happens if, assuming we nail these guys, none of them knows anything about Zimmer? You know ni go on as long as you want to, so will Annie and Natalia.

But you can’t spend your whole life in pursuit of revenge. Your Mom and Dad wouldn’t want you doing it. For six months now, weVe been alternately going through every Nazi era record in New Germany and all the stuff that was found at their mountain hideout, then going into the field to pursue the next set of leads.

“We’ve lolled or captured twenty-six men,” Paul continued, “and not a one of them, even under drugs, has known anything about Zimmer’s whereabouts. I don’t think we’re going to get him, Michael, even if we devote the rest of our lives to it.”

Michael said nothing.

Paul wenton. “Likelsaid, we’re all with you. You think we’ve got a chance of getting this schmuck, fine, youll never see me quit. But, if we don’t, just spend the rest of our lives doing this, then what?”

“What do you mean?”

There’s a world out there your father and mother would be busting their butts to rebuild if they were with us. You know that. All you’re doing is becoming an expert on neo-Nazis and a great hand at tracking people down, but that’s not doing anything to make this place a better place. If Zimmer surfaces anywhere, hell be arrested or shot. With Akiro running Eden, we don’t even have to worry about Dodd anymore.”

“I wonder. Anyway, we still owe him.”

“Kill Dodd and even Akiro will say ifs too much, Michael. Akiro pulled the plug on the charges against Natalia and the rest of us. Sure, Td like to twist Dodd’s head off and crap down his neck, and if you say we should do it, Fm with you, just like Annie and Natalia are with you. All Fm saying is that maybe there are some better things we should be doing, things John and Sarah would have wanted us to do. Like, whatever happened to you pursuing a medical education?”

“So I can find out my father’s and mothef s conditions are hopeless? I already knowthat, Paul. Anyway, every time Fm in New Germany, almost invariably I bump into Maria. With her marrying, ifs even more awkward than before.”

“How about Mid-Wake?”

Michael Rourke shook his head. “No. I could give you a bunch of reasons why I don’t want to live there, but in the final analysis, they’re all an excuse. I want to see the world, see what’s out there that we’ve missed. Being a doctor worked for Dad, but I can’t save lives with one hand and take lives with the other. I could never be the doctor he-“

There was a silence. He’d almost said ‘was’.

Paul broke the silence, saying, “You can do anything you set your mind to, Michael-“

Michael Rourke laughed, telling his friend, “Look, you may have been born a couple of decades before I was, but chronologically, Fm older than you are. And Fm not your seventeen-year-old nephew or something, who just decided to getatattoo and dropout of high school.”

Paul grinned, shook his head, said, Touche, Michael.”

The point is, I know what I don’t want to do. At least that’s a start.” And Michael looked along the trail, the hoofprints vanishing in the distance over the rise “And I know we probably won’t find Zimmer, Paul. And sometimes I wonder what Fd do if I did. Mom and Dad never taught me to commit murder, but God, Fd never forgive myself if I didn’t kill the bastard. How he could do that, murder a baby-Jesus, Fm - ” Michael bailed his fists, inhaled to keep the tears from coining, because sometimes they stiU did

“If we find him. well kill him, and we both know that, whether it’s murder or not, who cares? It can’t be a moral consideration to kill a man like Zimmer. But if we don’t find him, yet spend our entire lives looking for him, maybe well be giving him another kill to his credit, hmm?”

Michael Rourke rolled the reins of his horse between his hands, looked then at Paul. A man Michael Rourke had never heard of, before the attack on the hospital, was responsible for the near death state in which his father and mother now existed, would perhaps exist forever. And the murder of their child.

“Ahttletongerr

Paul just shook his head. “Yeah, well look a Me longer. But, I tell you, if we’re still saying this years from now, well-I don’t know.”

Michael Rourke caught the horn and swung up into his saddle Indian fashion.

Paul mounted more deliberately. Then they both continued along the trail.

Three

The desert was gone and it was night and he was inside a house. He recognized it. It was the sprawling farm house they had lived in before The Night of The War.

But, it wasn’t then, before The Night of The War, because at the dinner table, along with Sarah, there was a grown up Annie, a grown up Michael, and Natalia and Paul were there, too.

On either side of his empty dinner plate were his guns.

Sarah said to him, “Have you seen the baby, John?”

“No, I haven’t.”

She just smiled. When he looked down, his plate was no longer empty. John Rourke looked more closely at the plate, because what was there was not food, but the United States.

It looked like the outline of the North American continent as it would be seen from space, and there were lights twinkling everywhere and, as he looked more closely and started to mention what he saw to the others at the table, all around him there was blackness, except for the outiine of North America in the distance.

And the lights.

But the lights were different now, growing in intensity. As he stared, the lights were flashes, mushroom shaped clouds erupting everywhere, brilliandy bright, more and more of them, their light obscuring the shape of the continent, one flash after another after another after another and John Rourke looked around him.

He was sitting in an airplane.

The airplane rocked, lurched, seemed almost to twist.

A woman screamed.

John Rourke knew what was happening.

It was The Night of the War and he was condemned to relive it.

Four

The city, of more than two thousand people, had grown up almost overnight; or, more accurately over sixty nights or so. Four months ago, there had been nothing but desert where the Amazonian city of Manaus had once been, a wasteland where alternately hot and cold sandy winds blew and nothing of great consequence besides insects and rats lived. Like all of northern and central Brazil, when the fires came which burned the sky in the Great Conflagration, the rain forest had been wiped out, and with it the moisture.

The Amazon and its major tributaries, like the Negro, still flowed, to be sure, but they were not rivers that were the arteries of a once thriving nation, not highways through the greatest green area on the face of the earth, merely water. There were fish, mostiy bottom dwellers, but fewer species because the sun beat down without mercy in the daylight hours, since nothing grew here. At night was the cold. No life along the river, only eroded deserts too vast to contemplate.

Many tributaries no longer flowed, and it was part of the German plan for re-greening the Amazon and eventually re-oxygenating the atmosphere to free water frozen in mountain ice for irrigation of the high mountain deserts.

And what once had been Manaus on the River Negro, in north central Brazil, was now the boomtown for the new ecology.

The figure she was following, ArmandGruber, was a nonentity of a man, really, but for now he was the most important man in the world to her.

He turned into the Utile pub-like bar that was packed with mustered-out German soldiers working in the bio-project, some Chinese engineers and a few people who looked like they could be Americans from Mid-Wake. There was talk that soon there would be Russians here, and she did not long for their presence because

when Natalia Anastasia Tiemerovna wanted to hear her native tongue that badly, she could always talk to herself.

Natalia glanced at her mirror image in the shop window and primped her light brown hair and adjusted her glasses. Then she looked back down the street. This was the bad area of Opentown, as the name of the new Manaus translated into English. The jobs as police/security for the city paid litde compared to the hard labor or the tech jobs, so law enforcement personnel were hard to find and there wasn’t enough lawlessness (openly) to bring in the army. Built of pre-fab units, with streets wide enough to easily handle four lanes of construction traffic if needed, the bad section of Opentown was the only place where the people who worked in the new industry which had arisen here, could come to unwind. Annie followed Gruber into the bar the previous night and got away with just a few black and blue marks from pinches on her posterior.

From Natalia’s vantage point beside the shop window-cheap knives, cheap binoculars, cheap canteens, cheap everything (made in Russia) filled the display-she could see through the window constantly and the door of the bar every time the door was opened.

Annie had told her, “We should go back tonight together.”

“Remember, you are a married woman. Your rear end is spoken for. On the other, Fm not and mine isn’t. Anyway, Gruber might have noticed you.”

There was nothing more said of the subject.

At New Germany, Natalia and Annie, waiting for Michael and Paul to return from their latest field trackdown, became privy to intelligence data concerning a new Nazi cell in Opentown. There were already agents of the government of New Germany working to infiltrate the cell, but their success potential was dubious. And, although Paul and Michael would have preferred to pursue the lead themselves, she was sure, there was much to be said for two women being vasdy more able to dig out information in a wild boomtown, where men outnumbered women more than seven to one.

A trip for the right clothes (Annie was pathological about shopping) and some rinsable hair dye and they were on their way, both of them taking office jobs with the bio-industry, Annie as a bio-consultant from Mid-Wake and Natalia as a German national in environmental engineering. With her knowledge of computers and the fact that she had always been a quick study, she was able to fake being a

specialist rather well.

Armand Gruber, after a week of observation, somehow seemed just right and the bar-brazenly called the Lightning Bolt-was a rumored hangout for neo-Nazi sympathizers. Because New Germany was a free society, thinking like a Nazi was not a crime.

Acting like a Nazi was, however, another story.

The sounds of her high heels clicking on the pavement died the nearer she came to the bar, the sounds from inside growing louder.

She opened the door and went inside …

Michael Rourke ran his hand over his face. Stubble so old it was almost a beard. But, water here was scarce, and shaving dry was something he had no desire to try.

There was slight movement in the darkness to his left and the Beretta that rested on his thigh was in his hand and pointed toward the origin of the sound. But, as he’d anticipated, it was Paul returning. His friend and brother-in-law dropped to the ground beside him, exhaling softly as he whispered. “We got ‘em, all six of’em. Gotta be the same guys we’ve been tracking for the last ten days or so. I mean, no Nazi armbands or anything, but they all look pretty well dressed, all things considered, and they’re heavily armed.”

“The thing I can’t figure is what the hell they’re doing riding around out here all this time.”

“Beats me.” Paul answered, Michael barely able to make out a shrug of the shoulders in the darkness. “Unless they wanted us to follow them.”