Survivalist - 22 - Brutal Conquest Read Online Free PDF Page A

started to dress. Martin Zimmer’s trousers were a litde loose at the waist and tight at the thighs, fashionable men of Eden evidendy into underdeveloped muscles or looking as though their pants were about to rip. The trousers were also beldess. Except for a revolver on a Hip-Grip or the clip-type in-side-the-waistband holsters, this made carrying a gun at the waist rather awkward. The turtleneck was somewhat tight as well, but satisfactory. He slipped into the high-collared jacket with no lapels. As long as he did not attempt to close the garment across his chest, it fit all right.
    There was a hat that presumably went with the outfit. It was reminiscent of hats he’d seen worn by Mao Tse Tung in photographs. Michael Rourke looked at it in disgust, just carrying it in his hand instead of wearing it as he exited the bathroom.
    “I have a gun for you, Martin,” Gunther Hong said as Michael reentered the main portion of the cabin. Hong was holding a gunbelt in his outstretched right hand.
    Michael Rourke didn’t react instandy. The clothing he wore—Martin Zimmer’s clothing—was obviously not designed for convenient concealment of a firearm. Nor did people travel openly armed in Eden City. As much as Michael Rourke wanted a gun, he was convinced Martin Zimmer would not have taken it. So he told Gunther Hong, “That is what I have the defense forces for, isn’t it?”
    But he’d be damned if he’d wear the hat.
    They started from the borrowed cabin, toward the rendezvous with the aircraft, Michael presumed. As they moved through the bowels of the mobile fortress, men everywhere at their assigned tasks, Michael pondered something that had disturbed him from the very moment he first realized who Martin Zimmer was. Did Zimmer cultivate the near worship of John Rourke as some sort of evil joke?
    There were statues everywhere in Eden, most particularly the one of his father—Martin’s father, too—atop The Retreat. John Rourke’s face was on the coinage, the stamps, even the health certificates. Why? And why did Martin Zimmer conceal his own face from all but a few?

6
    Snow fell heavily from a low, overcast grey sky. There was little wind. Each step was difficult, the terrain beneath their feet rocky and uneven, yet masked with more than a foot of reasonably fresh snow.
    In the distance, to the east, the cloud cover was continually rent by chain lightning over the rift valley.
    They were on the trail. That was pure luck, of course, intersecting the trail after the first climb, but a little luck—of the good kind—seemed long overdue them. Natalia and Annie stayed with twenty-three of the women rescued from the fortress of the Land Pirates. John Rourke and Paul Rubenstein carried the twenty-fourth woman, injured during the crash of the helicopter, between them on a litter.
    This woman had the same chances for survival that the other women had. If shelter and food could be found soon, she would live. Otherwise, she would not.
    To have used their radios to contact Allied Intelligence, assuming with all the electrical activity not far away in the rift valley the radios would have worked at all, would have been to invite capture by Eden forces and the Land Pirates.
    The portion of the trail they followed led well west and, technically at least, was not part of Eden. Centu
    ries ago, Before The Night Of The War, it had been known as Arkansas. Because of the starkness of the terrain, nothing looked familiar, and it was frequently necessary to check the compass and the map to make certain they did not stray from the trail.
    No caves or large rock croppings presented themselves, so there was no place for shelter, not just from the cold but also from aerial observation. Because they were well enough away from the rift valley now, the Eden gunships could operate with impunity from the freak electrical storms.
    John Rourke turned around as he heard Natalia calling to him, watching as she came forward with Annie and one of the