“Michael’s all right ...”
Both children rested under the glowing translucent domes now, their faces bathed in the blue light, clouds of gas beginning to swirl around them. Rourke stared at them. Sarah stood on his right, Rourke’s arm around her. Natalia stood at his left, her hand in his. Paul flanked Natalia.
Rourke looked away from the faces of his children. For the last two minutes, the horror show had continued—the Soviet soldiers as they marched up the mountainside were dying, struck by lightning, ball lightning consumed some of them—human torches. Only three of the helicopters re-mained aloft, burning debris dotting the landscape.
“You’d think they’d give up,” Rourke murmured.
“Would you?” Natalia asked softly.
Rourke said nothing. After a long moment, then, “Paul—you’re—”
“Yeah—I know—I kind of figured—God,” and Ruben-stein let out a long, deep breath. “Guess I’d better lie down—in my chamber, huh?”
“Relax, Paul,” Rourke whispered, taking the needle, starting toward his friend.
Natalia embraced Rubenstein, kissing him on the lips. Rubenstein stepped back, looking somehow embarrassed. “I’m going to feel—funny, I’m—aw, give it to me,” and Ru-benstein started to sit down on the edge of his chamber.
Rourke extended his hand, the younger man taking it. “Paul, if I’d had a brother, it would have been you.”
The younger man smiled. “I love ya, both of you,” and he looked at Natalia then back at Rourke. Already he was roll-ing up his left sleeve.
“Loosen your belt, kick off your shoes—don’t want to constrict your blood vessels. Probably should all be naked.”
“I don’t think it’ll make much difference—if we live, we live—you taught me that,” Rubenstein smiled.
Rourke clapped the younger man on the shoulder, saying, “Until we wake up then.”
Rubenstein’s eyes were on the needle. Rourke started to put the needle to Rubenstein’s arm. Rubenstein blocked Rourke’s hand for a second, saying sheepishly, “I always hated shots—let me look the other way.”
Rourke gave him the injection . . .
Rourke, Sarah and Natalia stood beside the glowing blue lights, the three remaining unoccupied chambers. The elec-trical storm had intensified still more as Rourke studied the monitor for a moment. Natalia, glancing at Sarah, came into Rourke’s arms. Rourke held her.
“Don’t feel, well, just don’t,” Sarah whispered, her voice odd. She turned away, walking over to where the children slept, gas filling the chambers now in a swirling cloud.
“What are our chances?” Natalia whispered to Rourke.
“Natural granite will insulate against electrical shock—should keep the air from burning in here. After we’re all in the chambers, we won’t need air anyway. We’ll breathe the gas—it’s continuously purified. The plants over there will keep growing,” and he gestured beyond the far end of the great room, the plastic covered greenhouse there with the purple grow lights. “The underground springs should keep up our electrical power. Those grow lights should burn for years with the timers before the fluorescent tubes die—the plants will clean the air we breathed now so there’ll be clean air inside the Retreat when we awaken. Stale—but it’ll be clean. Nothing else on earth—unless it’s sealed in granite— nothing should survive, live. We have the only chambers that will work because we have the only serum.”
“The Eden Project—”
“If there wasn’t a meteor shower that got their hulls, or there wasn’t a malfunction in their solar batteries, or some-thing else no one foresaw—they would be back after we awaken.”
“I feel,” Natalia whispered, “feels like, like the harlot or something—” She glanced at Sarah.
“Don’t.”
“After we wake up, what—”
“Don’t worry—but I know I’m glad you’re with me, here.”
“Give me the injection, John, unless you want me to ad-minister the injection to—to Sarah, for you.”
“You sleep,” Rourke whispered to her, bending his face toward hers, kissing her lips.
She closed her eyes and leaned against him, murmuring, “I love you.”
“Natalia,” Rourke said softly, holding her.
He walked beside her, to her chamber. She sat on the edge of it and their eyes met as Rourke placed the needle against her skin. “I love you,” he rasped, giving her the injection. She closed her eyes—he missed the blueness there already. . .
It seemed to Rourke like an eternity, but it had been only minutes by the digital clock on the console beside the televi-sion monitor, only minutes since Natalia had given Michael the first injection. Sarah stood beside him. “Thank you for finding us—I think.” She smiled oddly. “We’ll have lot to talk about—the children, other things. You’d better hurry now.”
“You always talked us to death,” Rourke whispered, chill-ing at the word. He drew his wife into his arms, looked into her face, then kissed her.
“What are you going to do—about us?” she whispered back, kissing him again.
Rourke breathed hard. “Trust me once more?”
“I love you, John Rourke, and I know you love me. Whatever we make of our lives if we wake up, I guess it doesn’t matter as much as our loving one another. We should never have married—we both know that. But I love you.”
Rourke held her close, walked with her to her chamber.
“Will you be all right—can you get your chamber started after you—”
“I’ll give myself the injection just after I start my cham-ber,” he assured her. “I can hold my breath against the gas — I’ll be fine.”
“I know that,” she smiled, leaning up to him, kissing him, holding his hand. “I’ll see you in five hundred years.” She closed her eyes and sat on the edge of her chamber as Rourke put the needle to her skin.
“I love you,” he whispered, and as she sank back, asleep, he said the word, “Sarah.”
Chapter Seventy-six
Rourke studied the television monitor. Perhaps a hun-dred of the KGB troopers remained now, huddled on the ground, lightning smashing into the rocks beside which they took shelter.
“Armageddon,” he whispered. Two of the helicopters remained airborne, the sky around them alive with electricity. “Rozhdestvenskiy,” he said, staring at the monitor as one of the helicopters flew near the camera.
The sky was black, electricity filling the air, arcing across the ground now. He thought of Reed and what he had died doing.
Rourke, the double Alessi rig still across his shoulders, ran the length of the darkened Great Room, the bluish glow of the chambers chilling, eerie somehow. He stud-ied the faces in the chambers, one-by-one, the eyelids closed, the swirling gases marking the faces then seeming to whisk aside. “I have to,” he said to them. “I have to do this —show the KGB why they lost, why they’d lose again or anyone else would lose if it happened all over again.”
Rourke started to run again, past the far side of the Great Room, into the storage area.
In the dim light, he ran along the room’s length, past the rows of shelves and the provisions there, the ammuni-tion, the spare parts, the clothes—stopping by a small niche in the wall, a steel tool cabinet there. He threw his body against the tool cabinet, budging it aside, then shifting it away from the wall with his hands. There was a steel door, three feet square, a combination lock on it. He twirled the dial on the lock, right, then left, then right, twisting the handle, the door swinging out.
Rourke walked back to the shelves, pulling down a flashlight. He smiled—it was one of the angleheads he and Rubenstein had taken from the geological supply shop in Albuquerque—when it had all begun. He flicked the switch, nothing. He unscrewed the butt cap, reaching into another shelf, and pulling out two batteries, drop-ping the D-cells into the flashlight and screwing the butt cap closed. He turned toward the small, open steel door, walking toward it. Rourke bent down, flicking on the flashlight, shining it up inside. Rungs were anchored to the living granite, three feet apart, the tunnel inside an-gling steeply upward.