Free Survivalist - 23 - Call To Battle by Jerry Ahern

Chrome’s edges as well. He took his vintage copy of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged from his suitcase and picked up where he’d last stopped rereading when other matters had drawn him away.
    He read that for a time, but could not concentrate.
    He thought of Sarah, and the inevitability of his future should he live long enough to meet it. By the time the day came that Sarah would be restored to him, young Martin Zimmer, their son kidnapped at birth and raised by the Nazi Deitrich Zimmer, then genetically altered to mirror the image of Deitrich Zimmer’s idol, Adolf Hitler, would be dead. John Rourke would have to see to that in one manner or another. Precipitating the death of his own son, however evil and vile that life had become, would be the second most difficult thing he would ever have to do.
    For all that Deitrich Zimmer had done, the ultimate responsibility for young Martin being in the world was John Rourke’s, his and his alone. He alone had made Sarah pregnant with the child. And, but for the circumstances of the child’s birth, Sarah might well have been beside him. They could have lived out the rest of their lives, he and Sarah, in relative normalcy.
    And, together, they would be in their graves by now, knowing nothing of this future which the begetting of Martin Zimmer helped to create.
    The most difficult thing, even more than taking the life of young Martin, would be telling Sarah that he had done it, and losing her forever as the consequence. She would assume, as any mother would, that somehow Martin could have been changed back, for the good. But what Deitrich Zimmer had done to the boy, through the combination of genetic surgery and the environment in which the boy was raised, was irreversible, except perhaps by surgically or chemically neutralizing the personality centers of Martin’s brain.
    And that would be a far worse fate than death, to live physically only. If Martin were rational, the man that he could have been, fine and strong like Michael, Martin would choose death to that.
    John Rourke stuffed one of the ScoreMasters into his trouser belt and pulled on his old battered brown bomberjacket.
    Then he went out into the night to walk, to think, hoping that perhaps the fresh air would make it easier for him subsequently to fail asleep.
    There was a Marine walking across the quadrangle. The young man saluted. Rourke nodded and said, “Good evening.” Rourke kept on walking.
    His thoughts shifted to Emma Shaw. The woman was good company and a good cook. More than that, she was a good woman. She seemed to combine so many of the qualities John Rourke loved in Sarah and had loved in Natalia. If things were different, Rourke thought… But, they were not. Nor did he regret for a moment that he was married to Sarah, even though he knew she would leave him when she awakened to learn the fate of the child she had nearly died giving birth to, a fate John Rourke would have to fulfill.
    Rourke sat on a rock overlooking the harbor area, his eyes focused far out to sea.
    What he needed more than anything else now was for someone’s arms to be around him; more than at any time in his life, his soul ached with loneliness.
    He looked down into his hands. His eyes, always light-sensitive, enabled him to see in the dark. There was movement by his loafer-shod feet. It was a grasshopper, not particularly large, really nothing noteworthy about the creature. Rourke kept his feet still so that he would not inadvertently step on the creature.
    The grasshopper, like all lower animals, led a much less complicated life. But, with the privilege of human thought came responsibility for thought’s consequences.
    The grasshopper just “hung around” for several minutes, Rourke watching the creature all the while. And then it moved off. Rourke stood up, careful to direct his feet in the direction opposite the grasshopper’s path.
    Life was fragile, Rourke thought, for all.

11
    He had raised dogs or had helped his family to