The End is Coming

Chapter Three

He laughed when he thought of it— “trigger con-trol.” It had been his slogan, his watchword, so long—but so little time—ago. Paul Rubenstein pumped the Schmeisser’s trigger, a neat three-round burst across the forty yards or so separating him and Natalia from the dozen Brigands, pumped the burst toward the nearest of the two Brigands raising assault rifles toward them. And the Brigand—a tall, beefy man wearing a sleeve-less blue denim jacket—doubled up jacknife fash-ion, falling forward. A sharper, louder crack, hot brass pelting at his left cheek—Natalia’s M-16, a long burst, the sec-ond rifleman going down, his legs cut from under him, gunfire raining toward them now as others of the Brigand band opened fire, motorcycles start-ing out of the gravel parking lot, skidding into the loop of highway that flanked the lot on two sides.

“Back the other way!” Natalia was screaming. Rubenstein fired another burst, then another and another, the comparatively mild recoil shocking his body, bringing a wash of cold sweat to him, his arms aching like a bad tooth. He started cutting the Harley into a steep arc, firing another burst, downing still another of the Brigand bikers, the Brigand’s machine—a Japanese bike dripping chrome and gleaming like something just off a showroom floor—skidding across the highway. The Brigand was screaming, dragged behind it, the bike’s engine roaring, sparks showering up from the road surface, then a scream more hid-eous than anything Paul Rubenstein had ever heard— a shriek. The Brigand’s left leg, as the ma-chine whiplashed against a rock of massive pro-portions, the rock a barrier between the corner of the gravel lot and the loop of highway—the left leg was torn away, the bike exploding as it struck the boulder-sized rock, a spray of flaming gasoline belching laterally across the loop of highway then rising, the amputated leg of the Brigand like a flaming log, the Brigand himself screaming again as flames engulfed his thrashing body.

Rubenstein fired out the Schmeisser’s magazine through the sheet of flame, a Brigand biker crash-ing through it, bouncing to the highway, clothes and hair and face on fire. Rubenstein let the Schmeisser drop to his side on its sling, snatching the battered Browning High Power from the web tanker style shoulder rig under his field jacket, jacking back the hammer with his thumb. He fired once—the Brigand biker, a human torch, dropped, the burning arms and hands slapping up toward the face, the face like the burning head of a match. What had been a man fell. Rubenstein gunned the Harley, Natalia twenty yards back along the road by now, her machine stopped, the M-16 held in both her hands as she twisted in the bike seat, spraying death behind them. He shouted to her over the crackle of flames and gunfire— “Run for it!”

He shot his machine past her, hearing her ma-chine rev on the whistle of the slipstream. Paul Rubenstein looked behind him—Natalia was coming, riding low over her Harley, Brigand bikers—at least six of them—starting out of the loop of highway and following.