The Web Read online

  wanted to tell him to save himself—so at least one of them would survive.

  "Michael!" -

  "Keep going. Come on, Momma!" he shouted, water splashing across his open

  mouth, making him cough. Sarah was reaching, pulling, tugging, reaching,

  pulling, the shoreline still speeding past as she was pulled down by the

  current; but the shoreline somehow looked closer.

  Michael was pulling at her, pulling at Annie—she couldn't understand what

  drove him.

  She kept moving her arms, not really conscious of them anymore, not

  knowing if it was doing any good.

  Left arm, right arm, left arm . . . She wanted to sleep, to open her mouth

  to the water.

  She kept moving, her legs too tired now to push her.

  Something hard, harder than the water hit at her face and she looked

  up—red clay, wet and slimy and . . . she wanted to kiss it.

  Her left arm reached out, then her right, dragging Annie. The little girl

  was coughing, almost choking. Sarah slapped her on the back. "Annie!"

  Annie slumped forward into the muddy clay and rolled onto her back,

  crying—alive.

  "Michael!"

  He wasn't there—he wasn't—"Michael!" She screamed, coughing, getting to

  her knees, slipping in the mud. She saw a dark spot on the water, staring

  into it.

  His hair—dark brown, like his father's. "Michael!!" she screamed, tears

  rolling down her cheeks. Jump in and save him—yes, she thought. But if she

  died—Annie?

  "Mich—" His head went below the surface and she died, but it was up again

  and his arms waved above the surface and he was coming toward her.

  Sarah waded out into the water which thrashed around her waist. She tugged

  at the thong holding the saddlebags to her, loosed it awkwardly, then

  hurtled the bags to the shore, shouting to Annie, "Stay there, Annie!"

  "Is Michael alive?"

  Michael reached toward her and Sarah snatched at his hand. The boy came

  into her arms, both of them falling; then Sarah pushed them up toward the

  shore. Michael coughed.

  "He's alive, Annie," Sarah whispered.

  Michael hugged her, coughing still, and then Annie's arms were around her

  neck and the little girl was laughing and Sarah was laughing too. She

  whispered, 'Thank God for the Y.M.CA. pool!"

  Rourke sat sipping the coffee.

  "So when the war broke out—well we were always pretty cut off from the

  outside world, but we knew about it. The television reception here was

  never very good, but we lost the television stations, then the radio

  stations we could get. We knew ... all of it, as it happened. We sat up

  through the night in the town square, most of us, and we could see the

  lights on the horizons around the valley. We knew what was happening. We

  all sort of decided that living in a world that had been destroyed

  wouldn't be living at all. All but six families—and they left. They're

  probably dead now. See, we don't raise much more than what we have in

  truck gardens. The gas stations had just gotten their supplies before the

  war took place, and with no one going anywhere, well, we didn't use much

  gas. A lot of us—mostly everybody—just walk to work and such."

  "So you decided to keep things going—just like before," Rourke told her.

  "More or less." She smiled, sipping at her coffee, then pouring fresh

  coffee for Rourke. "At least to try."

  "But—"

  "But we realized it couldn't last forever. We only had so much. So we

  worked it out carefully—all of us. We all did. We were always close-knit—"

  "You're not from here," Rourke said flatly, sipping his coffee.

  "No. I'm not. It was my husband who was born here. He went away to medical

  school. We married and he brought me back here with him."

  "How did (he town live?" Rourke asked her. "I saw that factory—"

  "That's only been here the last seven years. It was all cottage industry

  before that. The factory makes some sort of equipment for the space

  program or the defense department; the people who work there never were

  quite sure.

  "It doesn't make anything, anymore," Rourke said soberly.

  "The factory is still running—"

  "Making what?" Rourke heard himself snap.

  "What they did before—everything is like it was before."

  "That's useless. That's insane! For what purpose?" Rourke asked her. "I

  mean—O.K., the holiday thing is pretty obvious. Make everyone happy as

  long as you can—but then what? What'll you do when the food runs out and—"

  "We won't do anything."

  Rourke lit one of his small, dark tobacco cigars—he was running low on

  those and would have to restock at the Retreat. "What was your cottage

  industry?"

  "Fireworks." She smiled.

  He felt strange—perhaps at the realization of what she was telling him.

  "You're not—"

  .

  "When strangers came in after the Night of the War, we asked them to stay.

  Some of them decided to join us. The rest of them are being taken care

  of—and they'll be released. That's why the police have gone to twelve-hour

  shifts."

  "When'll they be released?"

  "Christmas was always our favorite holiday here, the reunion of family and

  friends. It's—"

  Rourke hammered his hands palm downward onto her desk, then glanced over

  his shoulder toward the library behind him through the glass partition; it

  was dark, empty. He looked at his watch. It was after five. His vision was

  blurring.

  "I wanted you to stay."

  Rourke stood up, suddenly feeling strange, lurching half across the desk.

  "Coffee," he murmured.

  "We have the entire valley mined with explosives. And the night after

  tomorrow night, there'll be a fire­works display and then all of us ...

  we'll—"

  Rourke fell across the desk, cursing his stupidity. He looked up at her.

  "Mass—"

  "Suicide." She smiled, finishing his thought. "All two thousand three

  hundred forty-eight people in the town. That's why no one minded the lie,

  John. When I called you Abe." Rourke was having trouble hearing her,

  seeing her. He snatched for one of his Detonics pistols, but she held his

  wrist and he could not move his arm. "I was the only one who didn't have a

  family. My husband is dead. We had no children—there wasn't ever the

  time—the time to have children. But now I won't die alone, John."

  He started to talk, his tongue feeling thick, unrespon­sive.

  "I helped my husband in the clinic. I know how to use his drugs. You won't

  be able to do a thing, John—until it's too late, and then you can die with

  me, John."

  She was stroking his head, smiling, and he felt her bend over to him and

  kiss his cheek. "It'll be all right, John; this is the better way. We'll

  all die and it will always be the same—normal, like it used to be."

  Rourke tried to move his mouth to speak; he couldn't.

  It was heavy rain now, cold but not freezing, dripping down inside the

  collar of his permanently borrowed &#;Army field jacket, his hair too wet to

  bother with pulling up the hood. His gloves were sodden. The Schmeisser


  was wrapped in a ground cloth and the Browning High Power was under his

  jacket. His boots were wet, the Harley having splashed through inches-deep

  puddles in the road surface, and the going was slow to avoid a big splash

  that could drown the engine.

  He squinted through his rain-smeared glasses— Kentucky. He was entering

  Kentucky.

  Paul Rubenstein wondered two things: would he ever see Natalia again now

  that she was safe with Russian troops, and had Rourke made it through the

  storm to find Sarah and the children yet?

  Natalia had told the Russian commander that he, Rubenstein, was a Soviet

  spy who had been escorting her through American territory because he posed

  as one and was known to the Resistance people operating the area, thought

  to be one of them. His stomach churning as he'd done it, Rubenstein had

  agreed, backed up her story. Nat alia V credentials checked; he had been

  released.

  They had shaken hands only, but she had blown him a kiss by .pursing her

  lips as they had spoken a few yards from the Soviet troops. Then he had

  boarded his machine and started back into the storm.

  He had looked at her over his shoulder once; she hadn't waved, but he'd

  felt she would have if she could have.

  And John—that Rourke had gotten through the storm at all wasn't something

  over which Rubenstein worried— Rourke was all but invincible, unstoppable.

  But, as he released the handlebar a moment to push his glasses up from the

  bridge of his nose, Rubenstein wondered—had John Rourke found them yet?

  Tildie had wandered ashore minutes after Sarah had taken Michael out of

  the water; Annie had been the first to spot her. The animal was visibly

  shuddering.

  Sarah had built a fire by the shoreline in the shelter of some rocks and a

  red clay embankment; then having done what she could to warm the children,

  she had mounted Tildie—feeling the only way to warm the animal was to

  exercise her, then rub her down. Promising to keep them in sight, Sarah

  had started along the water's edge perhaps twenty feet above the

  shoreline, the wind of the slipstream around her and the animal, chilling

  her to the bone, but the animal responding.

  Sarah clutched the patched-together reins, leaning into Tildie's mane to

  let the animal break the wind for her. The air temperature was cold, but

  vastly warmer than it had been. In her heart, she knew the reason why she

  rode—to think; and she had another reason as well, to search for Sam, her

  husband's horse, her son's horse. Tildie couldn't carry Michael, Annie,

  and herself for very long.

  And there was affection as well, the affection between human and animal;

  she wanted to know that Sam was

  alive or dead, not half-broken and crushed and suffering.

  She reined m Tildie, about a quarter-mile closer to the damtiow. On tire

  red clay embankment beneath her she could see a shape, stained with mud,

  moving in the tree line.

  "Sam!" Sarah wasn't ready to risk the embankment with Tiidie. She

  dismounted, securing Tildie's reins to a sapling Georgia pine, then

  started down the muddy embankment toward the trees by the shore. She could

  see the form clearly now—an animal.

  She broke through the tree line, stopping. "Sam!"

  The horse, its white hide covered in a wash of red— blood?—started toward

  her. Closer now, she could see it was only mud. She held out her hands.

  The animal, frightened and weary, came toward her, nuzzling against her

  outstretched hands.

  "Sam!" She hugged the animal to her, the wetness of her own clothing

  seeming to wash away some of the red clay mud on the animal's neck. She

  checked the saddle, that it was secure, then swung up, catching up the

  rein almost as an afterthought. Her feet dangled below the stirrups which

  had been set to Michael's leg length.

  "Gotta get you out of here, Sam," she cooed, stroking his once-black mane

  and his red-smeared white neck. "Gotta get out of here." She nudged the

  animal forward with her knees. . . .

  It had taken time to find a way up the embankment, one that the exhausted

  animal under her could navigate; then she had gone back for Tildie. Sarah

  had switched to Tildie's back and led Sam, his cinch loosened and some of

  the mud covering him already flaking away.

  By the time she returned to the children, Annie was

  shivering uncontrollably and Michael was gone. Her heart seemed to stop,

  but then Michael reappeared, more wood for the fire cradled in his arms.

  She suddenly noticed he had no jacket—he had given it to Annie.

  She warmed Annie with her own body until the shivering subsided to where

  the little girl could control it. She talked, not to Annie or Michael, not

  really to herself, but just to think. "I lost my rifle. The horses are

  exhausted. Those maniacs, the one with the human-teeth necklace and the

  others, are probably still out there."

  She heard something which at once frightened her and comforted her. It

  would be Brigands; but the sound was lhat of a truck engine. . . .

  She left Michael with Annie and the horses, a half mile away, and hid

  herself, shivering in her wet clothes, in a bracken of pines not far from

  the water's edge. There was one truck, a pickup, and in the back of it,

  she noticed cans of extra fuel. With extra gasoline, she could run the

  truck's heater. It was a Ford, and she had driven Ford pickups often. She

  could drive this one.

  There were ten Brigands in sight, and if two rode the pickup truck it

  matched with the number of motor­cycles—eight bikes in all. Holding her

  husband's . automatic in her right fist she wiped the palm of her hand

  against the thigh of her wet jeans. She did not know whether gunpowder was

  destroyed by water; would the gun shoot at aff, would it blow up on her?

  There wasonfy one way to find out.

  She started down from the trees, edging closer toward the shore. The

  Brigands huddled by a fireside away from the vehicles, their weapons on

  the ground beside them or leaning beside tree trunks. She recognized some

  of the

  guns as Colt-type rifles, perhaps AR-s like the gun she had lost in the

  lake.

  All would be lost if the key had been removed from the truck. She knew

  cars and trucks could be started without keys, but she didn't know how.

  Her track shoes squishing, the bandanna wet over her hair, her body

  shivering under the woolen coat, she edged toward the front of the truck.

  She ducked, hiding by the grill, listening as one of the Brigands rasped,

  "I gotta take a leak—be back in a second."

  She heard gravel crunching—louder, coming toward her.

  She pressed her body against the front of the truck; the engine was still

  warm and she could feel its heat. The gravel crunching and the sound of

  the Brigand's feet against the dirt were coming closer, becoming louder.

  The ., cocked with the safety off, was in her right hand. She held her

  breath.

  The man passed her, walking off into the trees from which she had come.

  She let out a long sigh, then upped the safety on her pistol and peered

  ar
ound behind the rear of the truck, toward the other Brigands.

  They still huddled around the fire—nine of them. She pushed herself up to

  her full height and came around toward the driver's side. The button on

  the door was up. Before touching the door, she looked inside. "Thank you,

  God," she murmured. The keys were in the ignition.

  She shifted the pistol to her left hand, then with her right hand tried

  the door handle. It opened easily, the door creaking slightly on its

  hinges. She waited. None of the Brigands turned around.

  She started up into the truck, then heard, "Hey—

  hey, bitch!"

  She glanced behind her, toward the front of the truck. It was the man

  who'd passed her, gone into the trees to urinate. In that instant, she

  cursed men for being able to do it so fast.

  Sarah Rourke shifted the gun into her right hand, worked down the safety

  with her right thumb and pointed the pistol straight out between the open

  door and the body of the truck. She didn't say, "Hold it—don't come any

  closer." An old Sarah Rourke would have said that. She felt it in her

  bones. She pulled the trigger, the pistol bucking once in her right hand;

  the man's face exploded in blood.

  She dismissed him mentally, climbing aboard and setting down the pistol,

  the safety upped again. Her right hand worked the ignition, her left foot

  the clutch, her righl foot the gas. She hadn't driven in so long, she

  thought. The engine rumbled reassuringly, then caught.

  With her left elbow, she pushed down the door-lock button to give herself

  an extra instant while she found the emergency brake.

  She heard the creaking of hinges, looked across the seat, and saw a

  face—one of the Brigands. "What the fu—" She picked up the pistol as the

  man started for his, and she fired. His left eye seemed to explode and the

  body slumped away.

  She found the emergency brake, released it, and popped the clutch, looking

  to her left; there was a man clinging to the driver's side of the truck.

  She kept driving, hearing the man's muted curses, the hammering of his