The End is Coming

Chapter Ten

The black Resistance fighter’s name was Tom—he said Annie was “the cutest little girl he’d ever seen,”

and that Michael was more man than boy, pulling his weight, and that Sarah was a tough fighter, an angel of mercy—what held them to-gether since the loss of David Balfry.

Rourke had said nothing about the Mulliner boy.

And he walked now, his Harley left behind him with the man named Tom—he had told the man he was the quietest man he had never heard. But Rourke put being surprised down more to himself than to Tom’s skills—his mind had been else-where, his reactions turned off. Had Tom been a Brigand, or a Russian—he would have been dead.

He walked on.

He could see Sarah’s figure growing in defini-tion as he bridged the gap of distance between the depression’s overlook and the farmyard near the white corral fence. Her dark brown hair was all but obscured by what looked like a bandanna handkerchief. She wore a light blue shirt of some kind—it looked like a T-shirt. She looked, from the distance at least, like she looked when she worked in her studio, or about the house.

He walked on.

A small child, near a man propped beside a tree—too small, the child was, to be Michael. It was Annie. She looked like a miniature of her mother.

Where was Michael?

He walked on, a thin, dark tobacco cigar in the left corner of his mouth, clenched tight between his teeth. He lit it with cupped hands around his Zippo against the cool wind blowing up from the direc-tion of the burned-out farm.

The CAR-15 was across his back, slung diago-nally cross-body from his left shoulder. The musette bag on his right side whacked out and back against his body as he took long strides, even strides in his combat-booted feet. The binoc-ular case swayed and thumped at his right side, against the Pachmayr gripped butt of his Python there in the flap holster.

In the small of his back, where he’d placed it when he’d seen the Russians, was the two-inch barreled Colt Lawman .357—the one he’d used to shoot the Brigand leader in that first confronta-tion after the massacre of the passengers from the airliner he had landed—less than perfectly—in the desert outside Albuquerque.

The black chrome Sting IA knife was tucked inside the waistband of his Levis on his left side. He was barely conscious of the weight of the twin stainless Detonics pistols under his armpits beneath the battered brown leather bomber jacket.

He walked on.

The musette bag was heavy—he felt its weight. Spare magazines for the CAR-15. On his gunbelt, he carried the holstered Python. Hanging from his trouser belt, was the Sparks Six-Pack with loaded Detonics magazines, the Six-Pack a gift from the submarine commander, Gunderson. He inhaled the smoke into his lungs—memo-ries.

Natalia’s face. Paul’s face—memories he could feel now.

The future was about to turn around, to notice him—he could feel it as it started at the growingly clear image of his wife, Sarah Rourke.

He walked on.