"Ahern, Jerry - Survivalist 003 - The Quest" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ahern Jerry)

Karamatsov laughed, throwing the half-empty bottle across the room, then reached toward her. She tried to push away, edging back. Then his right hand clenching the belt, swung back past his left shoulder and slashed downward, and she screamed as the leather stung against her legs. She cringed, burrowing into the couch, feeling the sting of the leather on her bare behind, then feeling her husband's hands pulling her up. She was on her feet but looked away from his eyes. He had been like a father, yet a lover, her leader as she grew into her womanhood, the only man to have her. Now she could not look into his eyes. She felt the belt swish lazily against her flesh and his hands at the neckline of her gown, the robe open now. There was a tearing sound, and her neck and shoulders ached. She realized her eyes were closed. She opened them as he stripped away the tatters of her nightclothes. Automatically, her right arm crossed the nipples of her breasts and her left hand cupped over the triangle of hair at her crotch.

"Vladmir, please," she begged.

"No," he answered so softly she could barely hear him.

She watched the belt starting up again and tried to move aside, but his left fist crashed into her stomach and she doubled over, dropping to her knees on the carpet. Then she felt the belt across her back, felt his hand in her hair as though it were being ripped out by the roots, her head drawn back and her neck bent back to where she could barely breathe.

She looked finally into Vladmir's eyes. He said, "You won't fight." The belt, looped double in his right hand, lashed across her left cheek and the bridge of her nose and, as her left hand went to her face, it came away bloodied. She couldn't open her left eye.

His left hand was still knotted in her hair and he hauled her to her feet, then shoved her back onto the couch. He stood over her, his hands dropping the belt to open his uniform trousers, pushing them down as he fell on top of her.

"No," she whimpered. Then she turned her eyes away. She felt his hands on her, pulling at her breasts, his fingers knotting in the hair at her crotch, then his hands coming inside her.

"No," she murmured, then felt the hardness stabbing into her. "No!" she screamed. She stared up at the ceiling until he finally sank against her. Tears streamed down her face, but she felt she wasn't crying.

After a long while, she heard him mutter, "Bitch, unfeeling bitch." His right hand cuffed her face, then his left, then his right. Her mouth was bleeding, and she tried to raise her head because she was choking on the blood.

He was standing, reeling, the vodka bottle was back in his hand, some of the clear liquid somehow still inside, then he tilted the bottle. A smile, something like she had never seen, crossed his lips as he picked up the belt, looked at the bottle in his other hand, then lashed out with the belt, the heavy leather almost instantly raising a dark red welt across her breasts. He knocked her back to the couch, the bottle still in his hand.

The neck of the bottle was pointed toward her, held low, and she stared at it with her good right eye through the tears.

Vladmir Karamatsov whispered, "If I do not please you, then perhaps this will." And he laughed as he started toward her.

Natalia screamed, gagging on the salty taste of the blood in her mouth, her puffed and cracked lips drawn back in horror.

Chapter 8.

"I don't know," Rourke said, not looking at Rubenstein, but staring up at the stars. They were less than a mile from the principal entrance to the retreat. "Sometimes you get the feeling there's something happening, you don't know where or what, but that you're involved with it anyway, and that someday you'll learn what it was and when, sort of like the feeling you get when a shiver runs up your spine and people say that somebody's just walked across your grave. Maybe they have."

"What do you mean?" Paul Rubenstein asked, his voice sounding tired.

"I don't know," Rourke almost laughed. "Come on. Not much farther now." Rourke looked at the balding younger man in the starlight. Rubenstein was exhausted, his wounds still depleting his strength. The road to the entrance of the retreat was twisted and difficult. "Come on."

They rode the bikes, the engines barely above stalling, up the narrow pathway. Rourke eyed the familiar landmarks; he knew each tree and each rock. He had found the site of the retreat six years before, purchased it, then over the last three years was able to afford to convert it. It was a natural cave, carved over millions of years by the forty-foot-high waterfall from an underground spring, filtering from the natural pool at its base down into the rocks, coursing below in a narrowing cavern to God-knew-where, its origins, he guessed, perhaps as far away as the Canadian border, the water icy cold, crystal clear, perhaps only coming to light as it passed through the rear of the cave. He could mark the places where the waterfall had been over the millions of years since it had begun, how it had gradually carved out the cave. Giant stalactites were suspended from the cave ceiling and gradually bled their substance to form the stalagmites below them.

He used the underground portion of the stream as his hydro-electric power source, his own generators capable of supplying three times his maximum power needs. He had left the structure of the cave basically unaltered, the natural rise at the rear of the cave to the waterfall's right forming the main sleeping quarters, smaller natural mezzanines forming the additional rooms: two more bedrooms, the kitchen, and the bath, the latter shielded from the rest of the massive cave by a natural, opaque curtain of limestone. Rourke had electrified the cavern, plumbed it and, using a four-wheel drive pickup truck, gradually furnished it with appliances, bedroom furnishings, everything that would be needed to preserve the comfort if he were ever forced to live permanently in the retreat. Spare parts, service manuals, all were carefully catalogued and stored. The great room was the room he liked. It was the main body of the cavern and its rear was formed by the pool at the base of the waterfall. In this room were his books, records, videotape library, guns, his room, he had always thought of it. As he slowed his borrowed Harley Low Rider and signaled Paul Rubenstein to do the same, he almost felt a longing for the place, a sense of normalcy there.

"We're here," Rourke whispered.

"Where? I don't see anything."

"You're not supposed to." Then Rourke explained. "Once I had the retreat I realized it would be useless to me if I couldn't absolutely rely on the fact that it wouldn't be discovered. That meant I had to have some sort of secret entrance. In comic books, movies, science fiction, they put branches or shrubs in front of the cave entrance, but none of that works. I wanted something more permanent."

"So what did you do?" Rubenstein asked.

"Watch." Rourke dismounted from the bike and walked toward the cracked and rough weathered granite wall before them. He looked down; they were approximately half way up the mountainside. He walked to a large boulder on the right of his bike, then pushed against it with his hands. The boulder rolled away. He walked to his far left where a similar, but squared-off rock butted against the granite face. "See," Rourke began, pushing on it. "This whole area of Georgia is built on a huge granite plate at varying depths. This mountain is an outcropping of it, extending all the way into Tennessee, maybe well beyond. I did a lot of research in archeology to come up with this, how the Egyptian tombs were sealed off, Mayan temples." Rourke braced himself against the rock and pushed it aside.

There was rumbling in the rock itself, and Ruben-stein drew back. The rock on which Rourke stood began to sink, and as it did a slab of rock about the size of a single-car-garage door began to slide inward. "Just weights and counterbalances," Rourke said, smiling, his face reflected by the starlight. "When you want to open from inside, levers perform the same function as moving the rocks out here."