The Last Rebel: Survivor (23 page)

He had gone maybe a hundred yards on the open road when he heard some people talking, very faintly. At first, he didn’t know where they were coming from and then he did. Down the road.

He stepped into the woods. Maybe, he thought, they were coming his way. But after hiding for a few minutes he decided they weren’t.

He continued up the road, and as he did the voices got louder.

He climbed the final portion of the rise in the road by threading his way through the woods, and finally he could see.

It was, he thought, a group of Believers—he recognized them by their khaki uniforms and beards and medallions. They had the road barricaded.

He thought for a moment: should he or should he not go forward? There was no reason not to. He stepped out into the road, now fully exposed, and started walking toward them.

Within five yards he was spotted, and two of the Believers, both huge guys, trotted toward him, long guns at port arms.

Rosen kept walking toward them.

“Hold up, stranger,” one of them said, holding up a hand. “Who are you?”

“My name is Rosen. Morty Rosen. I’m a writer with
Rolling Stone
.”

Morty paused.

“I wanted to make contact with you guys.”

“Why?”

The two men came closer.

“Can you prove that?” one of them asked.

“Yes, I can. But I have to speak with your top guy to show him what I have.”

The men looked at each other. They were not sure which way to go.

“Look,” Rosen said, “I have something on me that will enable you to drive the Rejects from the land.”

They looked at each other again. They turned away from Rosen and whispered to one another, obviously discussing what to do. Then they turned back and the first one who had spoken said, “Wait here.”

With that, he ran back toward the barricade where there were three other men. Rosen watched him talking with a short man and then pointing toward Rosen. After ten seconds or so he ran back down toward Rosen. “Come with us, we’ll take you to see our major.”

“No,” Rosen said, “I don’t want to see a major. I want to see the top guy—the one known as Father McAulliffe.”

“Come with us. But first, we must search you. Do you have any weapons on you?”

“A .45 in my right-hand pocket.”

They went over to Rosen and patted him down, one of them removing the .45 from his pocket. They also searched his pack. What they did not search was his boot, which was going to help Rosen establish his identity—and much more.

TWENTY-ONE

The vehicle carrying Rosen and his guards went down the road that the barricade was on, and five minutes after they started they turned off onto another road, this one through the forest and so small that the vehicles looked as if they could barely get through. A couple of times branches brushed against the car, and Rosen then knew why the windows on the vehicle were kept closed.

They traveled slowly through this narrow, occasionally bumpy road. Then after another five minutes it looked like they would break out of the road into an open area.

When they did, Rosen blinked. The sight was, in a way, spectacular. Directly ahead, across an open field maybe a hundred yards wide, was what looked like a church. It was a large white building with straight edges and roughly shaped like a mountain. On the top of it was a massive white cross. It was one of the most awe-inspiring sights that Rosen had ever seen.

There was something written beneath the cross that Rosen was able to read only when he got to within fifty yards of it. It was written in script, and it said believe.

Rosen immediately thought of Ernest Hemingway, a writer who had died many years ago and who exhorted people to write with economy, because that equaled power. Rosen didn’t know if the writer of this word read Hemingway, but it sure had power.

The vehicle stopped about twenty-five yards from the entrance to the building in a packed-dirt parking lot, and then the driver parked the car next to a space where there were some twenty others. Then Morty was motioned to get out—in a nonhostile way—and, flanked by his two guards, walked toward a portal at the front of the buildings.

It was only when he got out of the vehicle that Rosen realized that the building was surrounded on all sides by mountains that were rough, covered with evergreens, craggy, and high—typical Rocky Mountains—and served as quite a dramatic backdrop to a totally dramatic building.

“This is some place,” Rosen said to no one in particular.

One of the people who was walking beside him said, “It was built to show our devotion to Jesus Christ.” And as he said the name he and the others nodded.

Rosen thought:
Well, you showed it, buddy.

The doorway was flanked by two other guards, and as they went by they greeted each other with the term “brother.”

The inside of the building was as impressive as the outside. It was a church, but a very impressive one. There were the usual pews, but there were also many paintings on the walls, most of Christ. The most dramatic thing he could see was a crucifix over the altar: the figure of Christ hanging from it was the bloodiest and most realistic he had ever seen. This Christ looked like he had really gone through agony, which, of course, He had. Another thought: and all because of the Jews . . . Jews like him.

The church was fairly crowded, maybe one-quarter full with both men and women, the women wearing hats of some sort, the men all Caucasian, as were the women. They ranged in age from very young to very old.

The feeling came through to Rosen like heat: this was one fanatical group of believers and adorers.

The guards walked him across the back of the church, then through a small door. To his left was a long corridor, which was far less lovely than the church, being made of cement blocks painted light blue.

Rosen walked along with them for perhaps fifty yards, then went through another hall and came to a large unpainted oak door on which there was one word: father.

They knocked, and someone said, “Come in.” A guard went in, was gone for a moment, and then the guards led Rosen in.

It was not exactly the word to describe the room they went into, but Rosen immediately thought of
spectacular.

In fact, the room was filled with religious paintings as well as statuary on shelves on all the walls. Rosen got a sense that he had stepped into a store where they sold religious objects.

A desk near the middle of the room might have someone sitting at it but Rosen couldn’t tell. The chair was turned around, and whoever was sitting in it couldn’t be seen behind the back of the chair.

Then he turned, and Rosen was surprised. The premier of the Believers was an awesome physical specimen.

The man’s features were plain, he wore glasses, his clothing was plain—a long-sleeved white shirt, undistinguished except for the medallion around his neck. And he wore a neatly trimmed gray beard. The only unusual thing was what was obviously a toupee—black—and a bad one: as bad, Rosen thought, as that any of TV preacher he had ever seen. What the fuck? Rosen thought. If you were going to be some kind of religious zealot, it seemed that you were required to wear a bad toupee.

The man smiled.

“You’re Mr. Rosen,” he said.

“Yes. What is your name?”

“I’m Father McAulliffe.”

“You’re the man I want to see.”

McAulliffe nodded. His toupee, Rosen noted, stayed on.

McAulliffe said, “May I ask who you are? You told the guard that you were a member of the press. Also that you have learned that the plague is gone?”

“Yeah. But I don’t want to be a member of your church.”

Father McAulliffe smiled. Rosen noticed his eyes behind the glasses. They were small and blue and had a certain glint in them that said this guy was a total f’ing nutcase.

“First,” Rosen said, “I should explain that I am a reporter for
Rolling Stone
magazine, and for two months I went undercover in the Rejects organization in Compound W.”

McAulliffe looked over his glasses at him. His eyes had darkened. Rosen had no question that he was dealing with a very smart, very cunning, very dangerous man.

“How did you do that?”

“Using the same methods I used in going undercover in a Brooklyn, New York, motorcycle gang and other places.”

“What were those?”

“Mainly you had to wait to be discovered. They had to find you, you couldn’t find them.”

McAulliffe nodded.

“Are you doing something like that here?”

“What do you mean?”

“Going UC for the Rejects.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

McAulliffe was silent.

“I have two things to show you,” Rosen said. “First is a tattoo. Reason: I don’t want you to think that I got this willingly. It was part of my UC persona.”

With that, Rosen opened up his shirtsleeve on his left arm, revealing the Reject tattoo.

McAulliffe didn’t react, except to say: “What’s the other thing?”

“The main reason I’m here,” Rosen said.

McAulliffe looked at him.

Rosen said, “I was trying to think of the value of what I’m about to show you, and I came across a couple of quotes that might do that. From Sun Tzu in his
Art of War
. You know of Sun Tzu?

“Yes,” McAulliffe said.

“He said: ‘A hundred ounces of silver spent for information may save the thousands spent on war,’” Rosen said.

“That’s true.”

“And the other one I like is from Napoleon. It’s real clear and straightforward: ‘One good spy is worth twenty thousand soldiers,’” Rosen said.

McAulliffe nodded.

“Well, I didn’t start out being a spy,” Rosen said, “but I gathered a spy’s know-how because I figured that one day it might be valuable to someone.”

“Mr. Rosen, what exactly do you have?”

“I have the Rejects’ orders of battle in the entire United States, which is, of course, the strength, command, structure, and disposition of personnel, units, and equipment, plus the locations of all Reject compounds. In other words, I have intel that will enable the Believers to drive the scourge of the Rejects off the face of the earth.”

“Where is this information?”

“In my left shoe.”

“What’s to prevent me from just taking it from you, assuming I think of it as valid, and not give you a reward? I assume you want a reward.”

“Nothing. But I don’t figure you’d do that. You’re a man of God, right?”

“Yes, a soldier for Christ.”

“I didn’t figure you’d do it.”

McAulliffe nodded and said, “And how do I know that what you’re giving me is valid, correct? How do I know you’re not a fabricator, as they say in spy circles, providing false information?”

“I think that would be pretty simple,” Rosen said. “I assume you have some valid intel about the Rejects, stuff gathered by your own people. All you have to do is take those random samples and see if they jibe with the intel you’ve gathered.”

McAulliffe looked at him.

“Fair enough.”

He paused. Then: “Let me ask you this. Why are you giving us this information? What do you want?”

“Simple, I want to live,” Rosen said, “both in the short and the long term.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m sure the Rejects are going to be looking for me. I hooked up with what’s left of the Rebels . . . “

“Ben Raines’s army?”

“Yes, but he’s dead. Yeah, died of the plague.”

McAulliffe nodded.

“Anyway,” Rosen said, “I made a mistake while in the Rejects’ camp and they found out I was UC for
Rolling Stone
. They sent the escape unit after me, but the Rebels killed them all. But they’ll be coming again. They know that if I’m able to get a story in the magazine about them it’s not going to do them a lot of good.

“Also,” Rosen continued, “if you don’t win the war with them we are all going to die anyway. I had to set aside my reportorial objectivity and go for one side or another. I just want to be embedded in your army, not only to protect myself, but to have a front-row seat on the battles.”

“Why don’t you convert to Christianity and join us?”

Rosen laughed hard.

“Are you kidding? I’m beyond repair.”

“No one’s beyond repair.”

Rosen was about to say: how about Premier Szabo? But that might have pissed off the Father.

The Father nodded.

“Can I see what you have?”

Rosen loosened the shoelaces, then reached down the side of his boot and extracted a folded-up glassine envelope that contained a folded sheaf of papers.

“Some of these notes were written when it was pretty dark outside, so some of it may require translating,” he said.

Rosen handed the sheaf of papers to McAulliffe, then retied his laces. McAulliffe opened up the papers very carefully—this was one deliberate dude, Rosen thought. Fifteen seconds later a tall man came into the room. Like all the other believers he sported a beard, this one gray, like McAuliffe’s.