Survivalist - 24 - Blood Assassins (4 page)

“Annie?”

“In here. We’re decent. Come on in, Paul.”

She turned away from the mirror, looked at her husband as he filled the doorframe. He wasn’t as tall as her father or her brother, but he was tall enough, and even though he was lean, he had good muscles and solid shoulders. There was a look of terrible sadness in his eyes. “It’s Momma, isn’t it?”

“Your mother’s dead, Annie.” Her father wasn’t even in the room as he spoke.

Natalia ran back to the window, clutched at the curtains, leaned her head against the glass.

“We’re gonna get the damn—” Michael began.

Paul crossed the room, folded Annie into his arms. Annie realized only then that tears were already flowing down her cheeks, thought absently that her eye makeup was waterproof. She closed her eyes as she sagged into her husband’s arms, saw the dream again. “The cryogenic chambers were burned. And there were explosions,” she related, her own voice sounding muffled to her, her head so close against Paul’s chest.

“You should have said something.” It was Michael’s voice “But it was already done, wasn’t it?”

“I, uhh—”

“She doesn’t know,” Paul said for her. “She had a headache, was feeling sick to her stomach earlier. I suggested that she should he down. She probably experienced it without knowing it, then only saw it after she was alseep.”

“Yes,” Annie said, trying to nod, but Paul was holding her so tightly she couldn’t. Her voice was gone and that was the last word she could say for a time.

Michael’s voice sounded strained, as if he were

holding back tears. “They’ll pay, but never enough.” On the last word, his voice broke.

She pulled away a little from Paul’s embrace, looked past him. She saw Michael, his head against the doorjamb, his right forearm over his eyes, his body shaking. Natalia went to him. She saw her father, John Rourke, dark circles under his eyes, his face expressionless, his cheeks drawn down, the tendons of his neck—visible under the open collar of the black knit shirt he wore—pulsing.

She could hear Natalia crying. Paul wept.

Annie put her arms around her husband’s waist, touched her lips briefly to his cheek, let him hold her while the tears came and her body shook.

She said the word, “Momma.”

Eight

It was nearly four in the afternoon when Emma Shaw heard the crunch, the muted hum of synth-rubber leaving pavement and coming onto gravel. The news broadcasts had been full of the events which had unfolded at New Germany in Argentina. The death of Sarah Rourke and of the heroic German General Wolfgang Mann at the hands of Nazi terrorist commandoes almost overshadowed the continuing eruption of Mt. Kilauea and its resultant devastation.

There was definitely a car outside.

Emma Shaw picked up the .45 automatic from under the couch and walked across the great room toward the windows.

She almost dropped the gun when she looked out, realized that the man in the car was John Rourke.

She had wanted to call him, not known what to say to him. “I’m sorry your wife is dead?” It would have sounded as hollow to him as it did to her. But, she really was sorry. She’d never known Sarah Rourke except from history books in school and that silly movie that

was made in Eden. But she’d resented the woman, a woman who was more dead than alive holding a man who was so wonderfully alive but who refused to live, a man she wanted for herself and knew she could never have.

The driver’s side door of the F.O.U.O. car was open, but John did not get out, just sat there. Emma Shaw watched him, her hands shaking. She set down her gun, ran the palms of her hands over her skirt, dug her hands into her pockets in order to stop her hands from shaking. Now her shoulders trembled instead.

Why had John Rourke come here?

“Ohh, God,” she whispered aloud, her own conjecture terrifying her.

He just sat there, still. What was he doing? Should she go out onto the porch? And what would she say then. “Want a drink? Coffee? Tea?”

Or herself.

She couldn’t say anything that wouldn’t sound trite and, at the same time, cheap, about them both.

She saw a long-fingered, strong, graceful hand reach out to the door and pull it shut, heard the soft purr as the electric motor restarted.

“No!” She shouted the word, but he couldn’t hear her, of course. She pulled open the door, ran out onto the porch, shouted louder, “John, wait!”

The car stopped.

What had she done? Emma Shaw almost verbalized. The door opened.

Should she run to him, should she— John Rourke stepped out of the car and she took a step back closer to her open door. John wore the same brown leather bomber jacket he’d worn when she picked him up off the slope of the volcano, the leather just as scarred and ash-smudged now as then. Black knit shirt, black BDU pants, black combat boots. A black mood?

And, why not, his wife and a son dead within less than the span of half a day. And, he would blame himself. Men did that. “John?”

“I, uhh—” The words came out of him like a sigh. He took off his dark-lensed aviator-style sunglasses and she could tell from his eyes that he’d been crying. And, before she was conscious even that she was moving, she was running down from the porch, running to him. She stopped, less than a foot away from him, balanced on the balls of her feet, the hem of her skirt swaying back and forth against her bare legs, her hands away from her sides, fingers splayed. “I had nowhere else that I could go, no one else that I could talk to. Paul and Annie needed to be alone. And Michael and Natalia, too. It’s my wife, you see. The Nazis killed her and I have to talk to somebody.”

John Rourke’s voice was tight sounding, his breath coming in short gasps as, she realized, he fought back tears.

That was why men died younger now as they always had, always would. Because they had to be men all the time.

Emma Shaw’s hands moved, jerky and awkward-feeling to her—moved slowly toward John Rourke’s face, touched him gently, caressed his face. “Talk to me.”

John Rourke nodded.

“And let me hold you,” Emma Shaw whispered,

drawing John Rourke’s head down toward her, his arms folding gently around her, his head bowing. She heard his tears, felt them against her own cheek, brushed her lips against his face, whispered, “I’m here for you, John.”

For such a long time that her arms and legs began to go numb, she held him like that, afraid to let go of him, or that he would let go of her.

Nine

Alternately, but not often, he would sip at one of the drinks on the table. One was a cup of decaffeinated coffee which had to be cold by now despite the self-warming cup in which she had served it. The other was a glass of red wine.

Neither the coffee nor the wine was very much gone. She had finished her coffee, sipped at her wine, watched John Rourke from across the table, listened.

“We were really going to make it,” he told her. “The baby, the hospital, her work and mine. We were going to make it this time. No going off ever again, no leaving her. And after one hundred and twenty-five years, Zimmer finished what he started.”

“My dad always told me that the one comfort he had as a cop was that the ones he didn’t catch up with on this side, God’d catch up with on the other side.”

For the first time since he had arrived more than an hour ago, John Rourke smiled. Then the smile left him. “God won’t have the chance, at least not before me, unless Zimmer drops dead before I find him.”

“There’s a whole world war about to happen between you and him, John.” She lit a cigarette, almost absently offering one to John. He just shook his head. She told him, “Go ahead and light a cigar. I’ve got air freshener.”

He nodded again, took a cigar from the coat beside him (his coat was getting her couch filthy from dried mud and volcanic ash, but that didn’t matter). He lit the cigar with his battered old lighter, the lighter perhaps only a few years younger than he was.

He set it down on the coffee table. She’d read once that psychologists believed that a man setting down some personal object—like a lighter, a key ring, something like that—was symbolic of feeling at ease, in control.

“May I see your lighter?” Emma Shaw asked him.

“Of course,” John answered almost absently, picking up his lighter and reaching it across to her.

She leaned forward, took it, leaned back in her chair and turned it over in her hands. The lighter was bare brass, and she was uncertain whether it had started that way or had once been possessed of a finish. Engraved across the bottom beneath the word Zippo, partially obscuring the words Bradford, Pa., were the intitials JTR. “How long have you had this, John?”

“Since I was a kid,” he told her.

“And you were always very careful with it; I don’t mean the finish, but careful to keep it functional, never lose it?’

He looked up from the glass of wine he seemed to be studying with microscopic intensity and asked, “What’s your point, Emma?”

“That sometimes we lose things—or people—even though we tried our best not to. And, it’s not our fault. When my mom died, for a long time I wondered if maybe something I’d done or hadn’t done could have changed things. After a while, I guess I learned that nothing I could have done could have changed things. If you had a hole in your pocket, and your lighter fell out, you might never find it.”

He smiled. “I know it sounds obsessive, but I always check my pocket seams before I put on a pair of pants. The same with jackets.” He shrugged his shoulders. “And anyway, this is different.”

“Why? Because when the Nazis hit your hospital a hundred and twenty-five years ago, you survived and she didn’t survive as well? So, you should be feeling guilty for living? I don’t buy that, John. Want some dinner?”

“Maybe I should go.”

“Where?’

“I don’t know.”

“You’re the sensible one. Eating regular meals is good for your health. If you want to be healthy enough to go after the men you want to kill, then you’ll need your strength.”

“Mother?” John asked, smiling. But the smile faded again.

“Maybe that’s what you need, and maybe not. But, that’s not what I am. But I like cooking for you. Want some fresh coffee or are you planning on poisoning your digestive system?”

John Rourke said, “Well, since you put it that way.”

She got up to start dinner.

*

He ate little, having no taste for it, despite the fact that she was right and the food was good. He’d eaten nothing all day.

She sat across from him, looking at him now and again. Finally, John Rourke said to her, “You’re a good friend.”

Emma Shaw stirred her coffee with a spoon, didn’t look up from it as she said, “What’s on your mind?’

“I don’t know.” He got up from the table, walked across the room and went out onto the porch.

After a few seconds, she followed him. He was lighting one of his thin, dark tobacco cigars as she came up beside him.

“Those things taste any good?’ Emma asked him.

John Rourke just looked at her. “What?”

“I asked if they taste any good, the cigars.”

“I like them,” Rourke told her, exhaling smoke through his nostrils. What a pecular woman Emma Shaw was, Rourke thought.

“Let me try,” she said, her hand touching his, taking the cigar from between his fingers. She inhaled; to her credit, Emma Shaw did not cough. “Strong. Sure these things aren’t carcinogenic?”

“The ones I smoked in the Twentieth Century were, even the ones Annie made for me out of tobacco she raised herself. These are German. Won’t cause cancer.”

“And when there’s the war, will the Germans fly them into Hawaii just for you?”

“If I asked them to,” Rourke nodded, “they’d get me a few.”

She inhaled again, this time exhaling smoke through her nostrils. “But you’d go without before you’d do that, smoke cigarettes. Strategic material would take preference, right?’

“Uh-huh,” Rourke nodded.

“But I suppose you’ve planned ahead, have a long-term supply laid up.”

“Uh-huh,” Rourke nodded.

Emma Shaw puffed on the cigar again. “Figured out what’s on your mind yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Want to hear what’s on my mind?” Emma asked him. “Sure.”

“You feel like you could burst inside? Because of what’s happened?”

Rourke didn’t answer her.

“Do you feel so sad you almost want to die?”

John Rourke took back his cigar, inhaled the smoke deeply into his lungs. He looked out into the night. There was a beautiful, albeit not majestic, view. “Nice just standing out here in the fresh air,” Rourke said.

“Sarah is dead. Natalia is Michael’s woman. You’re lonely. Everybody has somebody, except you. Do you want me?”

John Rourke turned around and looked at her. “What?”

“Do you want me, John? Like I want you, John? I love you. I don’t expect you to love me back, but maybe it wouldn’t hurt to be held, to let whatever happens happen. I mean, maybe I’m awfully brazen or callous, with your wife just dead. And I’m sorry. But with the

war coming, maybe I’ll be dead, too. Or you. I admit you’ve given it a good try, but even you’re not immortal. I’d like to have you, however you’d like to have me, John.” And she looked away from him, shook her head, seemed to force a little laugh. “There! I’ve said it.” She exhaled loudly, then barely whispered, “And you think I’m a slut or an opportunist or—”

John Rourke snapped the cigar into the gravel beyond the porch, his hands going to her shoulders, turning her around. “I think you’re a marvelous woman. I respect you—”

“Ohh,” she whispered, looking down.

John Rourke still held her shoulders. “That’s not what I meant,” he told her.

Her face turned up toward his and her grey green eyes met his eyes squarely. “Then maybe you should tell me what it is you do mean, John.”

John Rourke almost whispered, “I don’t know what I feel, what I mean, but you were right. Being with you, I mean, uhh—”

“Are you going to kiss me, John?”

“I was thinking about it.”

“Well, then whenever you’re ready.” Emma Shaw whispered.

John Rourke, his hands moving down across her arms, to her waist, settling there, drew Emma Shaw up and toward him, lowering his face to hers.