The End is Coming

Chapter Six

There had been more Russians as Rourke had moved off the highway and kept to the side roads, the dirt tracks—more and more Russians. Supply convoys—tanks riding shotgun for them—moved along each major artery in the directions of cities large enough to have airports. He had spent hours watching them, unable to move because of them, waiting.

A truck had broken down—an axle, Rourke had guessed, watching from the distance with his Bushnell 8x30s. After some time of Russian offi-cers wandering about the truck, apparently shout-ing orders, cursing out the driver and the like, the truck had been unloaded.

Rourke had expected confiscated M-16s, or ex-plosives, or foodstuffs—even medical supplies. But when one of the crates had broken—more stomping around, more apparent name-calling and threatening—the contents had proven to be a microfilm projector. All of the cases inside the truck—as they were emptied out with meticu-lous care—were apparently possessed of the same con-tents. Rourke sat back, not looking at the road, con-sidering instead.

He studied the CAR-15 as he laid it across his lap—how many thousands of rounds had he fired through it? The parkerized finish of the thirty-round magazine up the well was badly scratched, but the magazine was wholly serviceable. Absent-mindedly, he wondered if his friend Ron Ma-hovsky, who had customized his Python, had survived the Night of The War. Rourke, retro-spectively, decided he should have asked Mahovsky to Metalife the CAR-15’s magazines for added durability. It was too late now—but many things were too late.

The microfilm projectors—why so many?

And he thought of Sarah, and Michael, and An-nie. The children would have changed—not the time, but the experience. And Sarah—he closed his eyes.

Before the Night of The War, they had always argued over his “preoccupation,” as she had called it,

“with gloom and doom, preparing for the un-thinkable”—his concerns with survival. She had seen guns as nothing more than weapons of de-struction.

Rourke studied the profiled CAR-15 across his thighs.

It was hard to consider a rifle a weapon of de-struction, considering the weapons unleashed on the Night of The War.

He closed his eyes—he remembered the flight across the United States that night—he could not forget it.

The children dying of burns in Albuquerque.

The teens who had called themselves the Guard-ians—in Texas. Their faces and their bodies scarred with radiation burns, their lives ending, their minds scarred and gone with the horror. He opened his eyes, staring at the gun—he had saved lives with it, tried righting wrongs. John Rourke closed his eyes again—he won-dered if Sarah had changed—at all.