The Awakening

by neetha Napew

  The first cannibal was coming closer, the other two hanging back slightly. Rourke swallowed hard—the reason for the man’s loping walk, he realized, was a bullet wound, the left side of the man’s body sagging, leaves plastered over the left shoulder, dried blood there as well. The wind shifted, and Rourke could smell it—the wound was suppurating. “I’m a healer—for information on my son, I’ll heal your wound.”

  The cannibal kept coming, raising the stone axe now to swing. The only other person alive—possibly—who could have shot the man would have been Michael. For that reason, as the cannibal moved toward him now, Rourke would not reach for the second Detonics pistol, or the Black Chrome Sting IA. The axe started the downstroke, Rourke side­stepping quickly, wheeling half right, his left leg snapping up and out, a double Tae Kwon Do kick to the left side of the cannibal’s head, the cannibal staggering, not falling. The other two were coming now, screaming something so guttural Rourke couldn’t even be certain the screams were not words, threats, the second cannibal closing. Rourke wheeled again, sidestepping as the stone axe cleaved the air where his head had been, a high sweeping forward kick with his right leg, then wheeling, the same high sweeping kick again, but this time the left leg, this time connecting against the jaw of the second cannibal, the axe flying from his hands. Rourke stepped in, the heel of his left hand hammering up and out, impacting the base of the cannibal’s jaw, his right hand punching forward, the middle knuckles finding the solar plexus—the human skin the cannibal wore over his own was cold, damp to the touch.

  The cannibal sagged back, Rourke’s left knee smashing up, hammering into the testicles, but Rourke feeling no squish as the cannibal doubled forward, Rourke sidestepping to avoid the canni­bal’s breath. The body fell. Rourke wheeled, the third cannibal charging, the first man up as well, grabbing his stone axe.

  Rourke spun one hundred eighty degrees left, back-kicking the cannibal once, then again in the chest, as Rourke’s right foot settled back to the ground. Rourke’s right fist backhanded the man across the center of the face, the nose shattering, blood spraying on the wind, Rourke wheeling right one hundred eighty degrees, a left hook to the cannibal’s jaw, then backhanding the cannibal across the face again on the backswing.

  The third cannibal was too close. Rourke threw himself down to the rock surface, rolling against the cannibal’s shins, the axe flying, the man’s body sailing over him.

  Rourke rolled onto his back, both legs coming up, snapping outward and down, Rourke up, to his feet, the second cannibal coming again. Rourke’s right fist snapped outward into the center of the face once, then again, then still again, the cannibal sagging, falling.

  Rourke wheeled left, the third cannibal on his feet again, coming, the axe in a giant swing laterally, Rourke wheeling, sidestepping. Rourke reached down to the rock surface, snatching up one of the fallen stone axes—the stones were wound to the wooden shaft with what Rourke recognized as dried and cured human intestines.

  Rourke swung the axe upward, blocking the lateral thrust of the cannibal’s axe, Rourke’s right foot snapping forward and up, into the jaw of the cannibal, Rourke backstepping. The axe heads locked, dragging the man forward and down as teeth spit from the cannibal’s cracked and bleeding lips. The cannibal rolled forward, Rourke side­stepping, half wheeling right, Rourke’s left foot snaking out, a fast double kick to the side of the head—he might be killing the man, Rourke realized. The man still moved, another double kick and there was no movement.

  The sound of feet against stone, Rourke wheel­ing. The first man, the one who bore the gunshot wound, he was coming, charging, blood covering his face and chest, the axe high over his head.

  There was no choice—Rourke swung the axe in his own hands, cleaving the stone head into the right chest cavity of the charging cannibal. The cannibal’s body rocked with it, the cannibal recovering, swinging the axe in a horizontal chop. Rouike blocked it with his own borrowed axe, pulling his opponent off balance. The cannibal swung the axe again, Rourke dodging back, dodging again on the backswing, Rourke’s own axe coming up, powering down, impacting the crown of the skull, a crunching, splitting sound, blood spraying in a pink cloud, then gray—the gray of human brain. The cannibal’s body fell backward, impacting the stone, bouncing, blood spraying upward again, the body rocking, the arms sagging, spread-eagling, still.

  The second cannibal, moving quickly now, reaching out for Rourke’s rifle. Rourke didn’t know if the man could use it. He couldn’t gamble. Rourke leaned out on his left leg, taking a half step as he wheeled ninety degrees left, his right leg fully extended forward, his hands and arms bringing the axe down diagonally, impacting the left side of the neck, the stone axehead locking in the chest cavity, a hideous scream, then a cloud of blood, then the smell of sphincter muscles relaxing, human excrement pouring from between the cannibal’s legs, the head hanging by a thread of flesh, flopping across the right side of the chest cavity as the body fell away.

  Rourke let go of the axe handle.

  He stood there a moment. The remaining cannibal was unmoving, still on the rocks where Rourke had kicked him repeatedly in the head to put him down. The eyes were open. Rourke assumed death.

  He reached down for his weapons—there was gunfire, the short, light bursts from Paul Ruben-stein’s Schmeisser, a familiar sound he hadn’t heard for five hundred years.

  Stuffing the Metalifed and Mag-Na-Ported Python into its holster, the CAR-15 and the Gerber in his left fist, Rourke balled his right fist around the Pachmayr gripped butt of the Detonics pistol—Rubenstein needed help. Three shots was the signal he had found something. There was another burst of subgunfire. Much more than three shots—Paul was in trouble.

  Rourke was already scanning the far side of the rocks for a way down.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  One moment he had been alone, inspecting what might have been tracks, then the next, sounds of branches breaking, of footfalls. He had wheeled, fired, fired again and again, cutting down at least six of them, falling back as the others regrouped behind low rocks.

  He stood beside his machine—there was no need for cover. They were armed only with stone axes. His stomach churned—they had worn human skins for clothing, some of them with the facial hair or the hair from the head still intact, one wearing on the center of his chest what appeared to be a skinned human face—eyelids and lips still evident. v The magazine in the Schmeisser he judged as more than half empty—too startled to count his shots, something he had taught himself to do, something he had made second nature. But the sight of them—he shivered, stabbing the partially spent magazine into his trouser belt, taking a fresh thirty-two round stick for the Schmeisser and ramming it up the well.

  Paul Rubenstein shifted the Schmeisser to his left hand for an instant, drawing the battered Browning High Power from the ballistic nylon tanker-style shoulder rig in which he carried it. The pistol in his belt, butt pointing left for access with his left hand, he took the subgun into his right fist again, steadying it with his left, waiting.

  Rourke had used the expression once—a drug­store stand.

  Both 9mms ready, he was ready.

  And the cannibals were coming now, raising from their positions behind the rocks.

  He fired a controlled three-round burst from the Schmeisser—but the cannibals didn’t hide, didn’t run, didn’t fall back.

  His fists locked to his weapon, he watched it, almost as if it were in slow motion, the cannibals, their stone axes swinging wildly over their heads, running to meet him, screams and shouts he couldn’t understand issuing from their mouths.

  He shifted the muzzle of the Schmeisser left, then started to fire, hosing them, cutting them down, stone axes launching toward him as the men who had wielded them fell, but more of the cannibals coming, like a human wave, he thought. He zigzagged the muzzle of the Schmeisser again and again, putting more of them down, more of them still coming.

  And the Schmeisser was empty.

  Paul
Rubenstein let the subgun fall to his side on its sling, no time to reload it, finding the butt of the High Power with his left hand, drawing it from his belt, jacking back the hammer with his left thumb, the chamber already loaded, thrusting the pistol outward, firing once, killing, firing again—a head shot—and the body falling, firing again, a hand loosing a stone axe, the body rolling back and down. Firing again, a stone axe flying skyward, a body spinning out, tumbling to the ground. But some of the cannibals he had already shot, with the subgun, now with the High Power, they were rising—coming. As if they were not perhaps human, as if they were unkillable.

  His right hand found the Gerber Mkll fighting knife John had given him. Rubenstein drew the knife, holding it ready in his right fist like a short sword, still firing the High Power, bodies falling as the stone-axe-armed cannibals closed.

  There was a shout from behind him. “Paul— hold on!” The roar of a motorcycle engine.

  “Natalia,” he whispered, the High Power empty in his left fist, no time to reload, his right hand punching out, burying the Gerber into the chest of one of the cannibals—through the skin of some anonymous dead woman whiclj the cannibal wore—burying the steel up to the hilt.

  The High Power—he crashed it down against the forehead of one of them like a skull crasher, the cannibal’s body sagging back. The roar of the bike again as a stone axe swung down toward him and he raised his left arm to block the blow however he could. A burst of automatic weapons fire—an M-16, a sound he knew well. The cannibal holding the axe crumpled, Paul sidestepping as the axe fell toward him without a hand behind it. In an instant he realized that a hand did still grip the axe, but the hand was no longer part of an arm. A scream— Rubenstein had the Gerber free and stabbed it into the chest of the cannibal with the severed hand.

  The bike—a blur of motion and color, the blackness of Natalia’s clothes, the bike impacting at the knot of the cannibals surrounding him, bodies flying, screams, more bursts of assault rifle fire as Rubenstein hacked into the human wall closing on him with the blade of the Gerber and the butt of his pistol. More assault rifle fire—then it choked off. “Natalia!” He screamed the word so loudly his throat ached with her name.

  The thunder of a heavy caliber revolver, then again and again, bodies peeling back from him.

  Natalia was suddenly there, firing her gleaming Metalife Custom L-Frames point blank into faces and torsos, the bodies of the cannibals nearest him falling away.

  A clicking sound—her guns were empty, he realized. Then another sound—click, click, click, then a scream. The Bali-Song, the gleaming steel catch­ing the sunlight, flashing across faces and chests and hands and arms, screams of the cannibals.

  She was beside him now, and suddenly they were back to back, only their knives—

  “John should be getting here,” he heard her pant. A cannibal came at him with a stone axe upraised—no way to block it, he realized.

  He started to thrust the Gerber forward.

  A sound then—a sound like no other, the flat booming of a .45, again and again and again, bodies peeling back. More of the shots from .45s, rapid succession, then throttled off, then the thunderlike sound of a heavy caliber revolver again—it would be John Rourke’s Python. Ru-benstein sidestepped, stabbing the Gerber into the chest of the stone axe wielder. Natalia spun beside him, hacking with her Bali-Song against flesh, screams, the booming of the Python again and again and again.

  Rourke’s face, Rourke’s body shouldering through, a knife in each hand. Natalia screamed, “We’re winning!”

  Rubenstein’s right arm ached as he worked the knife, cutting, hacking, killing until he lost count.

  After a long time Paul Rubenstein lowered his knife—because there was no one left to fight. Dead. Departed.

  He would have fallen to his knees to rest but there was no spot near him that wasn’t littered with all or part of one of the cannibals. He heard Rourke talking as he closed his eyes. “Only the most fit, the most strong among them would have survived, the very toughest. We’d better get out of here after we check the skins they’re wearing—that one of them isn’t Mi­chael’s.” And Rubenstein shivered but he opened his eyes so he could look for some fragment that would look like John’s face—which was Michael’s face—and he prayed he couldn’t find such a thing, not find it at all. And he reloaded his weapons in case they would come back and there would be more killing to do.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  There had been no one alive to interrogate,

  Natalia reflected, realizing at once that the thought was horribly cold-blooded.

  But she had interrogated prisoners before—and she hoped she would never again. As she hugged her face against Rourke’s back, the leather of his battered brown bomber jacket rough against her cheek, but good-feeling to her, she wondered almost absently what she would have been like had she never joined the KGB as a young girl fresh from the Polytechnic and fresh from studies of classical ballet.

  She had met Karamatsov at the Chicago School in the Soviet Union. It was called the Chicago School, she had always been told, because the type of English taught there, practiced there, used unflinchingly there, was Middle Western urban English, the most accent-free. She had learned the advanced techniques of her then-new craft there. And she had met Vladmir Karamatsov there, the experienced field agent, the senior officer, the hero who daily had braved the hateful Americans in his fight to preserve the people of the Soviet Union. After marrying him, she had learned that he was a lie, and that so much of what she had been taught in school, so much of what she had been taught in the various levels of her KGB training had been a lie.

  And John Rourke, the man whose body she hugged herself to as the Harley vibrated beneath them, speeding across the bumpy and rocky trails through the mountains—John, at her uncle’s urging, had killed Vladmir after Vladmir had nearly killed her in a fit of rage, violated her humanity to the point where she had fought him in order to survive.

  And she had fallen in love. With John Rourke. And now his wife seemed to despise him, or at least his actions, and the action had been for her, she realized. He could say he had planned for the survival of the race, that six adults, three mating pairs would be far greater guarantee of survival than only one. He could explain the logic. When he and Sarah someday died, the children would have been perhaps faced with incest or the extinction of the human race. And he would not have two wives—it was not his way. And Paul—Rourke had wanted to provide for Paul’s happiness as well. Rourke had allowed his children to age to adulthood.

  And now, with only the most fragmentary clue, they searched for Rourke’s son.

  For Michael.

  John had theorized that Michael, having en­countered the cannibals, would have pursued the cannibals rather than the mysterious light he had seen in the sky, and so they had left the due northwesterly course they had followed ever since leaving the Retreat, backtracking the cannibal’s movements by their hideous trails of cookfires and human bones.

  That they ate their own weakened or sick was obvious, but where had they come from? They could not have survived on the surface after the sky had taken flame. Where?

  She shuddered—less from the wind of the slip stream than from the fear they would find out.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  They had found tracks of Michael’s bike, then lost them again, doubling back. Dismounted, they stood now just inside the treeline, Rubenstein pulling away the withered brush. “It’s the bike you took from the Brigands after they attacked the airplane, John.”

  Rourke looked at the younger man, then back to the blue Harley Davidson Low Rider.

  “Check her to see if she’ll run—that gives us a bike for each of us until we find him.”

  “Why would he have gone on foot?” Natalia asked. Rourke looked at her—really seeing her for the first time in days, the surreal blueness of her eyes, the near blackness of her hair, the thing intangible inside her that made it so obvious to him that sh
e loved him. “Michael would have been getting close to something—maybe a concentration ol the cannibals that he’d followed. The engine noise would have frightened them off and apparently he wanted to observe them. So he left the bike. No pack, no other gear. Either he got in trouble and couldn’t get back for it or he’s still following them close.” “Then what should we do, John—if he’s that close to them maybe? What about our bikes?”

  Rourke glanced to Rubenstein for a moment, then back to Natalia. “There’d be a several day lead on us most likely—if we start getting close to something, we’ll play it by ear. But on foot we’d be forced to travel too slowly. We can cover in an hour more territory than he could have covered in a day. We could find him by morning, maybe,” and Rourke looked skyward, the sunvlow, yellow-orange on the horizon.

  “We can go on in the dark for a time at least,” Natalia announced.

  Rourke only nodded.

  His eyes were searching the ground and he moved now back from the bike and toward the partial clearing beyond the trees. It was guesswork only, he realized—no footprints would be visible on the hard ground. And the snow that had come and gone so quickly would have helped further to eradicate them. He wondered absently if it would snow for Christmas? Would he be home for Christmas?

  Did he really have a home?

  And he looked up from his search of the ground for a footprint he knew would not be there, feeling Natalia’s hand at his shoulder. And he saw in her eyes what he had thought he no longer had.

  Chapter Forty

  The lights had been off when he had awakened, the room as dark as a starless and moonless night, but he had felt her beside him in the darkness, heard her whispered murmurings, her tears that they would each soon be one who goes. And he had tried, not yet able to move, to explain death to her as he understood it. And that her understanding of her religion was not all as it should be. And he had held her—and she had cried again that if she carried his baby inside her that it too would die and Michael Rourke had not known what to say to her. It had been hours by the luminous black face of his Rolex—their only light in the darkened room—before he had felt he could move suf­ficiently well. But he had unbuttoned the front of the dress she wore—she had told him it was gray and a worker’s uniform, hours before he had touched his hands to her flesh, his right hand paining him but the softness of her body making the pain less something of which he was aware.