The Inheritors of Earth Read online

  THE SURVIVALIST SAGA CONTINUES by Sharon Ahern

  Over the years, we’ve gotten a lot of people asking if THE SURVIVALIST story could continue since not all the threads have been woven shut. We were involved in so many other projects, that while the interest was there for us, the time required was not. One of the biggest hurdles involved was getting the rights back from the publisher in order to use the character names and events. This hurdle was not cleared for a matter of years but, it finally happened. The paperwork was put into the file cabinet and we went on with our other obligations.

  About a year ago, Jerry and I started talking about what the Rourke Family could be doing now that their individual families have grown in size and much of their still existing world seems to have grown more peaceful. The Rourkes were just not the type to settle into a retirement village, playing Bingo on Friday nights. Danger would follow the “Family” wherever they chose to travel. Where will they go and what type of danger are we talking about? The new storyline has some villains from the past. No, Karamatsov is not returning. At least I don’t think so! There will be some new villains, catastrophes and some far out new acquaintances that will keep the Rourkes engaged in their usual endeavor—saving humanity. Add to the mix of mayhem, politics as usual, an ever growing family base, teenagers and familyties being stretched to the limit, some really cosmic intervention...

  So, we’ve got the rights, lengthy storyline and a cast of thousands all ready to go. The decision was made to invite longtime friend and book author, Bob Anderson, to co-write THE SURVIVALIST continuation with Jerry. Bob is a fine writer and has published books such as TAC Leader: What Honor Requires, Sarge, What Now?, Anderson’s Rules and Grandfather Speaks. He is an expert on weaponry and military skills and is an accomplished public speaker. He has been an avid fan of the series for many years and is familiar with the characters and the numerous stories. New readers we hope will discover a truly unique family saga that has tried to prove over the years that morality and a sense of justice are not just words; they are a way of life. This will be an ongoing collaboration with Bob and we’re hoping that fans of THE SURVIVALIST will be pleased to continue reading the series and, to enjoy the further exploits of John Thomas Rourke and his family.

  Books in The Survivalist Series by Jerry Ahern

  #1: Total War

  #2: The Nightmare Begins

  #3: The Quest

  #4: The Doomsayer

  #5: The Web

  #6: The Savage Horde

  #7: The Prophet

  #8: The End is Coming

  #9: Earth Fire

  #10: The Awakening

  #11: The Reprisal

  #12: The Rebellion

  #13: Pursuit

  #14: The Terror

  #15: Overlord

  Mid-Wake

  #16: The Arsenal

  #17: The Ordeal

  #18: The Struggle

  #19: Final Rain

  #20: Firestorm

  #21: To End All War

  The Legend

  #22: Brutal Conquest

  #23: Call To Battle

  #24: Blood Assassins

  #25: War Mountain

  #26: Countdown

  #27: Death Watch

  Books by Bob Anderson

  Sarge, What Now?

  Anderson’s Rules

  Grandfather Speaks

  TAC Leader Series

  #1 What Honor Requires

  #2 Night Hawks

  #3 Retribution

  The Inheritors of Earth

  Jerry Ahern

  Sharon Ahern

  Bob Anderson

  SPEAKING VOLUMES

  NAPLES, FLORIDA

  2013

  THE SURVIVALIST

  #30 THE INHERITORS OF EARTH

  Copyright © 2012 by Jerry Ahern, Sharon Ahern & Robert M. Anderson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission of the author.

  9781612329734

  Map of the New World illustrated by Colin Regn

  The alien design illustrated by Faith Maltese

  Table of Contents

  THE SURVIVALIST SAGA CONTINUES by Sharon Ahern

  Books in The Survivalist Series by Jerry Ahern

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Reintroduction

  Prologue: In the closing years of the 20th Century…

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three: Over 650 years in the future

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note from Bob Anderson

  Reintroduction

  A man with sun shades sitting on a wooden slat lounge chair, on a Hawaiian beach wearing jeans, boots and a leather bomber jacket would have once been incongruous, even laughable. That however would have been before the Night of the War; before the world had changed and mankind was almost obliterated. In this new world Hawaii’s climate included frequent rain and not infrequent snow. Often the islands were now under a cloud cover and a sweater or jacket was common.

  The climate changes came because of several factors; besides the effects of the nuclear attacks, there had been geological disasters. The much heralded and misunderstood San Andreas Fault had failed; much of the pre-war West Coast of the United States submerged and parts of Nevada and Arizona turned into beachfront property. A previously undetected fault under the Gulf of Mexico’s northern coast line had failed and peninsular Florida vanished into the sea. Other continents were similarly affected.

  Open ocean currents in the Pacific as well as the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic had been altered and changed forever; altering climatic conditions and creating glacier growth and formations in the northern and southern hemispheres, extending to roughly latitude 35°. In the aftermath of the worldwide holocausts, the map of the Earth has changed considerably. In many areas the ocean levels has risen, in others they dropped and extended the shoreline, but on a planet so drastically changed, little but the geography and climate was different.

  The man’s name was John Thomas Rourke and he had lost count of battles and injuries suffered at the hands of the enemies of mankind. It seemed that no sooner had one foe been defeated or a threat eliminated, or another incomprehensible problem solved; a replacement sprang up to take the place of the evil he had just defeated. It had all started so long ago; so many losses—so many faces—most gone but not forgotten.

  He had survived and now he just sat; he had been sitting for hours; remembering! The Pacific Ocean’s waves crashed onto the beach in front of his home on what remained of Hawaii but he wasn’t aware of them; he was simply remembering...

  His life had always been fraught with danger; Rourke had never figured out whether he had chosen it or it had chosen him. Not that it really mattered, it was what it was. He had faced every challenge. He had seen every disaster through. The end of his world, of his youth, had come and gone; it had vanished. Now the memories came and went like repeated av
alanches, each threatening to overwhelm him and send him tumbling and crashing to his death but they didn’t, they couldn’t. Rourke had already faced death; horrible mind-numbing death many times and each time had beaten it back.

  He thought of a conversation he had with his son Michael one night in the Retreat. He had tried to answer Michael’s questions about what happened and why it had happened. “Had the Night of the War never come, it’s sad to say that the eventual outcome for humanity might have been little different. The economy of the United States, like the economies of other nations, was already severely strained. The possible solutions to ecological concerns, such as the depletion of the ozone layer, global warming and over population were staggering even to consider.”

  “Trouble was, Son, if anybody did know the answers, no one was telling. And that was just one of the problems facing humanity. There were diseases, there was poverty, there was international aggression—the catalog was almost endless. And fewer and fewer people wanted to be bothered by the problems. It was better to bury oneself in self-indulgence, bury the mind say in ephemeral pleasures and just wait for the inevitable cataclysm.”

  “In some ways, the last half of the twentieth century was an era of renewed involvement, but only by a comparatively small segment of the population. Some people, out of ignorance or greed, aligned themselves with causes which were deleterious to mankind’s welfare. It could have been stopped and several governments actually had begun some plans for man’s survival but to paraphrase T.S. Elliot, ‘Mankind just went out with a bang’ rather than a ‘whimper.’”

  Just before the “bang,” particularly in underdeveloped countries across the world there had been massive unemployment, homelessness, starvation and astronomical inflation. Many of their citizens were hungry, homeless, helpless and hopeless. Their alternatives had been few, starve to death like the many laying dead in the streets of disease and hunger or do something about it. Sometimes drastic change is the only way. It was always better to die as a soldier for change than a starving beggar for existence. But it was too late. The options for corrective actions were lost and war loomed.

  When that time came—governments, some governments had thought they were prepared; they weren’t. Some of the population had survived in facilities under the ocean, others in bunkers, but it had almost been a planet wide extinction of the human race. Such a waste...

  On the night the war started and the end of the world began, Rourke was returning home. His airliner had been diverted and crashed-landed. That was when he first met Paul Rubenstein; a bespectacled nerd, a book worm. A geek with no training or abilities except one—he was willing to learn and he wanted to survive. He would do both!

  After recovering his personal weapons from the cargo hold of the crashed plane; he armed Paul. Armed with Rourke’s pair of Detonics CombatMaster .45 pistols in Alessi shoulder holsters, Colt Python and Colt Lawman revolvers, an A.G. Russell Sting 1-A boot knife, and a shoulder-slinged CAR-15 assault rifle they set out on an impossible mission.

  Paul became his right hand man, picking up a German MP-40 machine pistol in one of their first battles; Paul and that MP-40, which he insisted calling his Schmeisser would prove deadly and accurate. A team had been welded together into a fighting and a thinking unit; and without either—neither would have survived and a friendship had been forged. Once, Paul had described himself as John Rourke’s “faithful Jewish companion,” a reference, of course, to the Lone Ranger and Tonto.

  Rourke’s keen sight, consequently sensitive to bright light and often requiring him to wear sunglasses even at night, coupled with his experience as a medical doctor, survival and weapons expert and ex-CIA paramilitary operations officer gave him certain advantages. However, Rourke had known the long and deadly search for his wife and children and Paul’s parents in Florida was probably doomed from the beginning. He had no choice but to try.

  Early in their journeys Rourke and Paul had encountered a serious opponent, Major Natalia Tiemerovna whom Rourke had recognized from one of his own earlier missions. She was Russian KGB and the wife of Vladimir Karamatsov, head of the KGB in America, but the dark haired and beautiful enemy agent had first converted into a friend. Then she became a companion and finally a loved one—though never a lover. Her favorite weapons were a silenced Walther pistol, an M-16 and a Balisong knife, each of which she handled with competence and deadly efficiency.

  Throughout their trials, they knew that at any moment another button could be pushed and the ensuing nuclear holocaust would destroy everything. Crossing vast uncharted stretches of a North American Continent that lay in ruins and devastation they had found other survivors. Some were dying and some were innocent, but they had also encountered Soviet occupation troops, post-apocalyptic thugs and villains, biker gangs, mutants, cannibals, bands of outlaw renegade brigands and butchers and even the new President of the United States, Samuel Chambers.

  Ultimately they had survived off of luck, skill, tenacity, guts, drive and the ability to plan ahead. In the end, the Russians had solidified their deadly grip on America and created a threat so diabolical the human race itself might not survive; the imminent combustion of the earth’s atmosphere into a global mass of deadly flame. In the last moments of 20th Century Earth, Rourke was locked in a death struggle with Vladimir Karamatsov's replacement, KGB Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy.

  That last night he and Rourke fought just outside the protective door of the Retreat while in the distance Rourke could see the fire in the atmosphere triggered by the nuclear devastation approaching. “Kill the bastard,” he thought as he fired one last time and stumbled inside and hit the switch that closed the door and sealed himself and his family inside. Their cryogenic chambers and a special serum he had stolen from the Russians gave them the incredible opportunity to survive; but in a new world they would not see for 500 years.

  In Rourke’s mind he figured only a few would survive the Night of the War. He made a decision, setting his chamber to awaken him early—he then awakened his children, Michael and Annie. For five years he trained and taught them what they would need to know in order to survive and then had returned them to sleep. When the Awakening actually occurred, Sarah was devastated to find she had been robbed of her children’s childhood; both were now adults. A theft she would never forgive Rourke for.

  The planet-wide extinction feared did not occur, but there had been damage, serious damage. The atmosphere had been crippled, but not destroyed. Gradually, those that had survived began to flourish. Entire countries and their governments had simply ceased to exist. Army’s failed and the mighty fallen, knocked to their knees but not destroyed. Those that survived realized that the preparations had not been for “the end times” as much as the times of new beginnings.

  In many ways this new world was not unlike the one they had lost, there were some similarities. There were still enemies, some new and some old they would have to kill or die trying. Human animals, despots and maniacs, still strove to dominate those who wanted to be free. He had almost lost his son during those first days after the Awakening and he found that a vile and despicable enemy he had thought long dead, wasn’t.

  They encountered the Eden Project as the remaining shuttle fleet began to land; but not all that returned from space was to their benefit. In fact, one Eden crew member’s death within the first 24 hours of their return heralded both a Nazi resurrection and another Soviet madman hell bent on a planet wide domination.

  When Russians had kidnapped his daughter, Rourke had tracked them across the hostile frozen Arctic wasteland finding a group of humans, descendants of a community of Icelanders; isolated in a tropic paradise landlocked by ice and snow. Their blissful ignorance of the deadly battles occurring in the outside world was shattered. To remain alive and free he had had to teach them the damnable realities of war and killing and surviving and, rescue Annie.

  Rourke’s old archenemy, the Russian bastard Vladmir Karamatsov, long thought dead, resurfaced. Karamatsov now possesse
d a doomsday device that powered the evil lurking in the heart of each man, in order to satisfy his own lusts. He had been stopped but escaped and fled to the blackened wilderness of China with a plan to seize the nuclear arsenal of Communist China which had survived the fiery conflagration of the Night of the War.

  It was then Rourke and Natalia had discovered an underwater facility called MidWake where Marines still battled to defend liberty and justice but beneath the sea. Joining forces they discovered Earth’s largest space station at the bottom of the ocean that was home to an American Navy. Birthed in science, the MidWake survivors had also been fighters and keepers of 500 years of history. Rourke, Michael, Annie, Paul and Natalia were still fighting ancient enemies while longing for peace in a world without war. Karamatsov would also survive a kill shot from Rourke requested by General Ishmael Varakov, Natalia’s uncle, and leader of the Soviet Occupation Forces in America. Varakov many times showed himself to be a patriotic, honorable and reasonable Soviet soldier, who at times helped Rourke to stop some of the more extreme plans of the KGB. Natalia herself sent Karamatsov to hell.

  Russian Colonel Antonovich, Karamatsov’s second-in-command, however was ready to launch his own assault on the Second City of China; he was still after China’s nukes. Facing two apparent omnipotent adversaries, Michael was captured and had to be rescued.

  Days had become weeks, the weeks became months and the months turned into years as Rourke battled neo-fascists, learned of the death of his wife Sarah (murdered by his hated enemy Dietrich Zimmer), found the report of her death was false and was driven into a realm of darkness. As he was about to destroy Zimmer, Rourke was attacked by an unforeseen enemy and almost died.

  The saga had lasted over 650 years during which he had met, fought and vanquished the enemies of humanity in every form and shape that damnation could send his way. One Doomsday plot after the other had plagued him, battle after battle, trial after trial culminating finally, unexpectedly in victory.