Survivalist - 24 - Blood Assassins

by Ahern, Jerry

  “I think we’ll go visit middle America.” John Rourke said.

  Fifty-Two

  Considering the hour, it seemed not at all remarkable that the stores were closed and there were few people on the street. If the people of this mountain community kept to any sort of truly circadian rhythm, it was three or four in the morning here.

  And, as they left the park, the matter of time was resolved.

  A clock on the window of the veterinarian’s read a little past two-fifty, unless it was off resolving the question handily.

  “I do not like leaving our weapons behind,” Gunther Spitz said through clenched teeth.

  Rourke, walking between Spitz and Paul Rubenstein, said, “I’m not partial to the idea, either. But we’d attract instant attention if we didn’t.” Rourke was gambling, a pastime in which he preferred not to indulge. His bet was on the size of the population here and how close it might be to what it appeared. If the mountain held in excess of a few thousand people, strange faces might not instantly be noticed. And—so

  far, so good it seemed—if male attire encompassed the “casual look” their clothing might even pass.

  There were no women in evidence on the street, and only a few men, these in workingmen’s clothes, waist-length jackets and slacks, some few of the men even carrying lunch pails. Some of the men were bareheaded, some others wearing fedora-style hats or caps.

  In the few carriages that had passed along the street while Rourke, Rubenstein and Spitz had hidden their weapons in a dense row of hedges, Rourke had seen the occasional “well-dressed man” type, dark suit and hat, but that was it. The wagons mainly seemed to be carrying sacks or crates of produce, perhaps en route to stocking a market.

  Every face was white.

  Rourke had anticipated that.

  They stopped in front of the women’s apparel store. Indeed, the fashions worn by the mannequins and visible through the windows in the shop within confirmed Rourke’s earlier observation. Paul put it best, saying, “I wonder if David and Ricky’s mom shopped here?”

  “Possibly.”

  “What is this—”

  “This,” Rourke responded, “is indicative, perhaps, of a society which sees itself returning to ‘traditional’ values; then again, it may be nothing more than the vagaries of fashion.” Rourke looked off to his left. “Let’s check that mailbox at the corner, then see what’s down the block.” Without waiting for acquiesence, Rourke starting moving.

  A man wearing grey workpants and a windbreaker -looked at them oddly, but nodded a greeting. Rourke nodded back. He stopped at the mailbox. It was painted green, as mailboxes had been when he was a boy. On it was stenciled, “United States Mail” and beneath that was a white card with pick-up hours printed on it.

  Rourke looked down the street to his right. More stores, and beyond that houses.

  Rourke started walking. Paul said, “This reminds me of Albuquerque just after the Night of The War.”

  “In more ways than one,” Rourke agreed.

  Spitz said nothing.

  “Shopping are we?” Paul asked.

  John Rourke only smiled.

  The street was well lit, but by street lights and shop windows alone. Was there some sort of artificial daylight during “daytime” hours?

  As they passed a bookstore, Rourke spotted three uniformed men on bicycles coming their way, but down the center of the street. “Cops—get into the doorway!” And Rourke, Rubenstein and Spitz flanking him, moved quickly into the doorway of the bookstore. Rourke’s right hand was under his bomber jacket, to one of the two ScoreMasters he carried in his waistband. With the exception of the Model 629, the Crain LSX knife and the HK-91 rifle, John Rourke had all of his weapons.

  The policemen pedaled by without even looking their way, either otherwise engrossed or grossly inefficient. Paul started away, but John Rourke pulled him back, saying, “Look in the window.” There were a variety of novels, some of them appearing to be romances, some mysteries, all by unrecognizable authors. But there was also a collection of nonfiction.

  One of these books was The Annotated Mein Kampf, complete with a new introduction by United States Senator Charles Breen. The dust jacket featured a quote which read, “For those truly interested in Hitler the man as well as the brilliant philosopher and charismatic leader, this is the best yet.” The quote was attributed to Dalton Cole, President of the United States.

  Gunther Spitz laughed aloud. “These are my people!”

  Paul Rubenstein’s jaw tensed, the cords in his neck slightly distending.

  John Rourke glanced over some of the other titles (The Race War Without, The Coming Cleansing of Earth, Christianity and The White Race) as he told Spitz, “If you feel like getting killed, go right ahead and run after those policemen. I have a feeling you might not be any more welcome than we would, ‘Heil Hitler’ and goosestepping notwithstanding. And for God’s sake don’t tell me that all Nazis are brothers. That would be absurd even coming from you, Gunther.”

  Rourke started back onto the sidewalk.

  And across the street in the middle of the block, he found what he’d been looking for. “Come on.”

  Paul said, “Shopping.”

  Fifty-Three

  As John Rourke knotted his tie in the mirror—it was a solid blue in color and felt like silk—he listened to the radio. The music, although the precise tunes were unrecognizable to him, was the sort of thing he remembered from his boyhood, light 1950s pop music. Rourke liked much of the real music of that period. Songs sung by Sinatra, Torme, Clooney, Crosby and others were part of his now inaccessible music collection at the Retreat. This, on the other hand, sounded like bad elevator music.

  On the half hour, at three-thirty (Rourke’s Rolex read somewhat differently, but he made a mental note of the correlation), there was news.

  “Good morning. This is Tom Fields with the early A.M. news on the Big Band Easy Sounds of WRPH AM. A spokesman for President Dalton Cole has confirmed that four of the Outsider saboteurs captured overnight by the Defense Forces are still at large in the city. Police are combing all levels and sectors and FBI Director Harold Hayes promises, and I quote, ‘These

  killers will be found and brought to justice before they have the chance to do their dirty work.’ Unquote.

  “Police urge all citizens to be on the lookout for outsiders and report all suspicious persons to the proper authorities at once. Unconfirmed reports indicate the outsiders may be of mixed race and might be able to pass for white.

  “In other news, Defense Forces spokesmen have released casualty figures for over the weekend. In a clash with negroes and Jews attempting to mount an attack force against the north entry site, thirty-two Defense Forces personnel were killed. Tempering that sad news is the fact that more than two hundred of the negroes and some seventy-six Jews, and a dozen more males of unidentifiable race were killed when the attack was repelled.”

  “What does he mean, this fellow?” Spitz said, pulling on the jacket from a grey single-breasted suit. “What negroes and Jews?”

  Paul said nothing.

  Rourke slipped his shoulder holsters on. “I think I may have finally added up some things which on the surface seemed rather confusing. The sum, unfortunately, is rather unpleasant.”

  “You speak in riddles, Herr Doctor.”

  Paul, knotting his tie, said, “No he doesn’t. Think. The gas we detected on the summit. For executions, it would seem. These guys have a war-footing society here, but they don’t have a war. So, they pretend they have a war. And even a pretend war has to have some real casualties. The ‘good guys’ can’t always come through unscathed.”

  “Precisely,” Rourke said, nodding. He slipped on the double-breasted jacket of the blue pinstripe suit. “Notice that electronics shop next door? Lots of radios. Record players. Even some reel-to-reel tape recorders, not a single television—video to you, Gunther. Know why? Bet I do. You can stage still photos in a newspaper, maybe even some newsreel f
ootage for use in a theatre. Not television coverage, or at least not so easily. So, no television. Just radio.”

  There was no weather report; that would have been ridiculous at any event. The music returned. Paul shut off the radio.

  Rourke took the hat which he had selected—a dark grey fedora with broad brim and high crown, identical to the one his father had worn when Rourke was only a boy—and he placed the hat on his head, slightly cocked over his right eye. “What do you think?”

  “That’s you, John,” Paul observed, grinning. Spitz, on the other hand, seemed in the blackest of moods; perhaps, Rourke thought, the Hauptsturmfuhrer was beseiged with doubt about where his duty lay. As Rourke secured the two ScoreMasters in the waistband of his pleated front trousers, Paul said, “Just like Humphrey Bogart.”

  Rourke laughed. “Hardly, but you’ve already won my daughter’s hand in marriage.”

  Paul started very seriously to laugh, leaning against the counter from which they had, all three of them, just liberated briefcases for stowing their regular clothes.

  Spitz said, “I see no cause for mirth, from either of you. I am stranded here while my men may be enduring tortures for their fidelity to the Reich. And, if you are right, Herr Doctor, then an attack is about to begin against this place.”

  “Not much more than an initial foray to test the defenses here, I’d think,” Rourke commented. “At any event, when we leave here we’ll find someone to volunteer the necessary information that will enable us hopefully to find your personnel. Then we get them out at least, possibly ourselves as well. What exactly did your orders say, by the way?”

  Spitz exhaled, long and hard, splaying his fingers over a glass countertop beneath which cufflinks, tie clips and watches with fake leather bands were displayed. “I was to locate two objectives within the city.”

  “And?” Paul asked.

  Spitz looked at Paul, drew another breath, said, “And I was to place the two of you under arrest; failing that, kill you both.”

  “Then Zimmer doesn’t care about his son,” Paul remarked.

  John Rourke lit a cigarette, stared at himself in the mirror. “I’d say Zimmer cares about his son a great deal, but not the man we have in the cryogenic sleep chamber.” Had life been a cartoon, a lightbulb would have flashed over his head in that instant, Rourke realized. He had been played for a fool from the very first.

  “John?”

  Rourke shook his head. “You didn’t know about the cloning, did you, Spitz?”

  “I do not understand either of you.”

  “The man in the cryogenic chamber isn’t Martin Zimmer,” Rourke said.

  Paul sucked in his breath.

  Rourke wasn’t about to divulge the fact that it was actually Michael asleep in the cryogenic chamber left behind under guard of Natalia and Annie, But neither was it Martin Zimmer whom John Rourke had caused to die over the volcano, half a world away in Hawaii. “He cloned his son—my son—at the same time that he cloned Wolfgang Mann and Sarah—no, earlier. Of course,” and Rourke inhaled on the cigarette, exhaled, making a low whistling sound as he did. “The image of Martin and the image of me, Zimmer’s joke on the world.”

  “I fail to understand you, Herr Doctor.”

  “He’s got the original Martin, and he’s got copies, perhaps dozens of them,” John Rourke almost whispered. “The basic problem with cloning a sentient being—aside from the fact that one cannot, at least at the moment I’d assume, copy the very thing which makes an individual an individual, his mind—is the morality of it. After all, once the clone exists, he or she is a separate living being, with all the inherent moral rights of a human being. He can’t be used like a lab sample, or a spare parts source. But to a man like Deitrich Zimmer, the morality isn’t a problem. And, with his undisputed mastery of advanced surgical techniques, the use of spare parts would be almost infinite.”

  “What—what are you saying?” Paul asked.

  “I’m saying that Deitrich Zimmer can manipulate human life to his will.” And John Rourke looked then at Gunther Spitz. He asked him flat out, “What were the two targets in your orders, Spitz?”

  Spitz, whose complexion was normally very fair, looked slightly pale. He held one hand over his stomach as though it were churning. “The remains

  about which you were informed. They are here, the remains of the Fuhrer.”

  “That’s one target. What’s the other?” Paul pressed.

  Spitz’s eyes had about them a dispirited look, something like the look Rourke imagined one would see in the eyes of a condemned man in the instant prior to his execution. “I do not understand why, but I was to take over a storage room which I was told would be guarded by the city’s best-trained troops.”

  “No explanation as to the specific nature of the objective?” John Rourke asked.

  “Only that if I had sufficient forces remaining which would enable me to secure one of the objectives, that was the one I must hold, lest it be destroyed.”

  Paul wrapped his fingertips against a glass countertop. They were in the rear of the haberdasher’s, this portion of the store was cut off from the front and, hence, out of view from anyone on the street by heavy curtains. It was here apparently that the higher priced items were purveyed. Rourke had disabled the alarm system with ease. Paul had mentioned that—“I know, this isn’t stealing—it’s just resupplying in the field,” echoing and at once parodying his reactions at the geological supply store in New Mexico following the Night of the War.

  All three of them stood, as if waiting for some brilliant insight, Rourke thought. And then, he had that insight, its brilliance debatable but its importance paramount. “I know why we’re here.”

  Both Paul and Gunther Spitz just looked at him.

  Rourke spoke very slowly, not wishing to repeat anything, still working out the nuances of his realization as he said, “In the intelligence field, everything that’s really important is on a need-to-know only basis. I’m sure that’s the same for your people today, Gunther. Just as it was when I was part of Central Intelligence Before the Night of the War.” It was as if the threads of John Rourke’s life were being woven together into a pattern, and if he looked at it in just the right way he could discern it. But, if he blinked, its meaning might forever be lost to him. He stubbed out the cigarette—one of the noncarcinogenic German ones he occasionally smoked—and lit another in the blue yellow flame of his battered old Zippo windlighter. “You have to understand the Twentieth Century in order to comprehend, I suppose.” Rourke pushed the fedora back off his forehead, began to pace the room, talking as he walked. “Science and technology never moved faster. I knew a man who was born in 1898. That was well before powered flight. As a boy, he helped his father hitch horses to a wagon because it was before the automobile. He lived what would be considered a relatively brief span of years by today’s standards, when practically everyone’s living well past a hundred. But he lived to see powered flight and even fly in an airplane. He lived to see men set foot on the moon, the reuseable spacecraft, all of that. Because technology never moved faster than it did in the Twentieth Century. The body of knowledge expanded almost exponentially, not just in the United States but in all the advanced nations of the world. And, sometimes, it went off at a tangent, this quest to know.

  “Sometimes, like evolution, it went down a wrong turn which ended up in a blind alley. Sometimes too,” Rourke said, his voice barely above a whisper, “it went where it shouldn’t.” He looked at Spitz. “Virtual

  Reality—you understand it was in its infancy during the Twentieth Century, where someone could wear a clumsy helmet and a glove and perhaps stand on a treadmill and through primitive electronics, when compared to today, interact within a computer-generated environment. There was a man—I don’t remember his name, but I heard about the work. It was for the Defense Department. They tried everything once, it seemed. The Navy was using psychics to assist in tracking enemy submarines. That sort of thing.

  �
�This man who worked for the Defense Department,” Rourke continued, “got the idea of recording human brain waves, on a huge scale, then digitizing them. He wanted to build a computer program that would allow reading of the human mind, and eventually programming the mind. Supposedly he had the brainwave research to a point where he could translate some element patterns. To test the possibility of practical application, he fed this data through a very sophisticated—for the time—very sophisticated computer array. He tried his theory on a volunteer, using the brainwave program in conjunction with virtual reality.”

  “What happened?” Paul interrupted.

  John Rourke exhaled heavily, stubbed out the cigarette. “This was all rumor, but I found it intriguing, pursued it a bit. As best I was ever able to ascertain, the test volunteer went insane. Sensory overload. He used a sharp piece of equipment to slash his wrist. And there was a sort of elephants’ graveyard for research data and equipment. It was somewhere in the eastern United States, in some bombproof facility. What if that was here? What if Deitrich Zimmer learned about those experiments through some reference or another?

  Coupling the potential of that body of research and experimentation with modern electronics and computer capabilities and Zimmer’s own work with cloning, he could create human beings almost at will.”

  “The power of God,” Gunther Spitz murmured.

  “In the hands of the devil,” Paul whispered.

  John Rourke picked up the briefcase which contained his clothes and boots and musette bag. “We’ll find your men, Spitz, if we can, then find that facility. And then you’ll have to decide. If the research really is there, do you want a hand in turning earth into hell? Or will you help Paul and me to destroy it?”

  John Rourke started walking toward the back door.