Swan Song

by Robert R. McCammon

  “Uh ... I’ve got new arrivals with me, Corporal.”

  “Sorry, sir. Cleanup crew’s on the way.”

  Schorr switched off the walkie-talkie. His smile returned, but his light brown eyes were uneasy. “Minor problem, folks. Earth House has a top-line drainage system, but sometimes we get these minor leaks. Cleanup crew’ll take care of it.”

  Elise pointed upward; she’d noticed the jigsaw of cracks and patches in the ceiling. “That doesn’t look too safe. What if that thing falls in?” She looked wide-eyed at her husband. “My God, Phil! Are we supposed to stay here for two weeks under a leaking mountain?”

  “Mrs. Croninger,” Schorr said in his most soothing voice, “Earth House wouldn’t be at ninety-five percent capacity if it wasn’t safe. Now I agree, the drainage system needs work, and we are getting it in shape, but there is absolutely no danger. We’ve had structural engineers and stress specialists inspect Earth House, and all of them gave it the okay. This is a survivalist condominium, Mrs. Croninger; we wouldn’t be here if we didn’t want to survive the coming holocaust, right?”

  Elise glanced back and forth between her husband and the young man. Her husband had paid fifty thousand dollars for membership in the Earth House timesharing plan: two weeks every year, for life, in what the pamphlets called a “luxurious survivalist fortress in the mountains of southern Idaho.” Of course, she believed the nuclear holocaust was coming soon, too; Phil had shelves of books on nuclear war and was convinced that it would happen within a year, and that the United States would be driven to its knees by the Russian invaders. He had wanted to find a place, as he told her, to “make a last stand.” But she’d tried to talk him out of it, telling him that he was betting fifty thousand dollars that nuclear disaster would happen during one of their two-week timesharing periods, and that was a pretty crazy gamble. He’d explained to her the “Earth House Protection Option” which meant that, for an extra five thousand dollars a year, the Croninger family could find refuge in Earth House at any time, within twenty-four hours of the detonation of an enemy-fired nuclear missile within the continental United States. It was holocaust insurance, he’d told her; everybody knew the bombs were going to fall, it was just a question of when. And Phil Croninger was very aware of the importance of insurance, because he owned one of the largest independent insurance agencies in Arizona.

  “I suppose,” she finally said. But she was troubled by those cracks and patches, and by the sight of that flimsy chickenwire sticking out of the new hole.

  Sergeant Schorr accelerated the electric cart. They passed metal doorways on both sides of the corridor. “Must’ve cost a lot of money to build this place,” Roland said, and Schorr nodded.

  “A few million,” Schorr said. “Not counting loose change. A couple of brothers from Texas put the money into it; they’re survivalists too, and they got rich off oil wells. This place used to be a silver mine back in the forties and fifties, but the lode ran out, and it just sat here for years until the Ausleys bought it. Here we are, just ahead.” He slowed the cart and stopped in front of a metal door marked Sixteen. “Your home sweet home for the next two weeks, folks.” He opened the door with a key affixed to an Earth House insignia key chain, reached inside and switched on the lights.

  Before she followed her husband and son over the threshold, Elise Croninger heard the sound of water dripping, and she saw another puddle spreading in the corridor. The ceiling was leaking in three places, and there was a long, jagged crack two inches wide. Jesus! she thought, unnerved, but she stepped into the room anyway.

  Her first impression was of the starkness of a military barracks. The walls were beige-painted cinder block, decorated with a few oil paintings. The carpet was thick enough, and not a bad color of rust red, but the ceiling seemed awfully low to her. Though it cleared Phil’s head by about six inches, and he was five feet eleven, the apparent lack of height in the suite’s “living area,” as the pamphlets had called it, made her feel almost ... yes, she thought, almost entombed. One nice touch, though, was that the entire far wall was a photographic mural of snow-capped mountains, opening up the room a little, if just by optical illusion.

  There were two bedrooms and a single bathroom connecting them. Sergeant Schorr took a few minutes to show them around, demonstrating the whooshing toilet that flushed upward to a tank, he said, that “delivered the waste materials to the forest floor and so aided the vegetation growth.” The bedrooms were also of beige-painted cinder block, and the ceilings were made of cork tile that presumably, Elise thought, hid the latticework of iron beams and reinforcing rods.

  “It’s great, isn’t it?” Phil asked her. “Isn’t this something?”

  “I’m not sure yet,” she replied. “I still feel like I’m in a mine shaft.”

  “Oh, that’ll pass,” Schorr told her amiably. “Some of the first-timers get claustrophobia, but it wears off. Let me give you this,” he said, and he handed Phil an Earth House map that unfolded to show the cafeteria, the gymnasium, the infirmary, and the arcade game room. “The Town Hall’s right here,” he said, and he pointed on the map. “It’s really just an auditorium, but we figure we’re a community down here, right? Let me show you the quickest way to get there from here....”

  In his bedroom, the smaller of the two, Roland had switched on the bedside lamp and was scouting a suitable electrical outlet for his computer. The room was small, but he thought it was okay; it was the atmosphere that was important, and he looked forward to the seminars on “Improvised Weapons,” “Living off the Land,” “Governments in Chaos,” and “Guerrilla Tactics” that the pamphlets had promised.

  He found a good outlet, near enough to the bed so he could prop himself up on pillows while he programmed the King’s Knight game on his computer. In the next two weeks, he thought, he was going to dream up dungeons and monsters to roam them that would make even an expert, jaded King’s Knight like himself tremble in his jambeaus.

  Roland went to the closet and opened it to see how much room he had to store his stuff. The inside was cheaply paneled, a few wire hangers dangling from the rod. But something small and yellow suddenly flitted like an autumn leaf from the back of the closet. Roland instinctively reached out and caught it, closing his fingers around it. Then he walked over to the light and carefully opened his palm.

  Lying stunned in his hand was a fragile yellow butterfly with streaks of green and gold along its wings. Its eyes were dark green pinheads, like gleaming emeralds. The butterfly fluttered, weak and dazed.

  How long have you been in there, Roland wondered. No telling. Probably came in on somebody’s car or camper, or in their clothes. He lifted his hand closer to his face and stared for a few seconds into the creature’s tiny eyes.

  And then he crushed the butterfly in his fist, feeling the body smear under the power of his grip. Zap! he thought. Super Zap! He sure hadn’t come all the way from Flagstaff, he told himself, to share a room with a fucking yellow bug!

  He dropped the mangled remnant into a wastebasket, then wiped the iridescent yellow sparkle from his palm onto his khakis and went back to the living room. Schorr was saying goodnight, and the other two men had just arrived with the luggage and Roland’s computer gear.

  “Orientation at 0800, folks!” Schorr said. “See you there!”

  “Great,” Phil Croninger said excitedly.

  “Great.” Elise’s voice delivered the jab of sarcasm. Sergeant Schorr, smile still locked in place, left Number Sixteen. But the smile disappeared as he stepped into the electric cart, and his mouth became a grim, rigid line. He turned the cart around and raced back to the area where the rubble lay on the floor, and he told the cleanup crew that they’d better move their asses to patch those cracks—and this time keep them patched—before the whole goddamned section fell apart.

  TWO

  Burning Spears

  The man who liked movies

  Judgment Day

  The greeter

  Underground boys<
br />
  Discipline and control makes the man

  Charter

  6

  July 17

  4:40 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time

  NEW YORK CITY

  HE’S STILL IN THERE, ain’t he?” the black woman with orange hair asked in a whisper, and the Hispanic boy behind the candy counter nodded.

  “Listen!” the boy, whose name was Emiliano Sanchez, said, and his dark eyes widened.

  From beyond the faded red curtains that led into the auditorium of the Empire State Theater on Forty-second Street there came a laugh. It was a sound someone with a slashed throat might have made. The sound of it grew louder and higher, and Emiliano put his hands to his ears; the laughter had reminded him of a locomotive whistle and a child’s shriek, and for a few seconds he was back in time, eight years old and living in Mexico City, witnessing his kid brother being struck and killed by a freight train.

  Cecily stared at him, and as the laughter rose in volume she heard a girl’s scream in it, and she was fourteen years old and lying on the abortionist’s table as the job was done. The vision was gone in an instant, and the laughter began to fade. “Jesus Christ!” Cecily managed to say, whispering again. “What’s that bastard smokin’?”

  “I been listenin’ to that since midnight,” he told her. His shift had started at twelve and would continue until eight. “You ever hear anythin’ like it?”

  “He alone in there?”

  “Yeah. Few people come in, but they couldn’t take it neither. Man, you shoulda seen their faces when they come out! Give you the creeps!”

  “Shit, man!” Cecily said. She was the ticket-seller and worked in the booth out front. “I couldn’t stand to sit through two minutes of that movie, all them dead folks and such! Lordy, I sold that guy his ticket three shows ago!”

  “He come out, bought a large Coke and buttered popcorn. Tipped me a buck. But I tell you, I almost didn’t wanna touch the money. It looked ... greasy or somethin’.”

  “Bastard’s prob’ly playin’ with hisself in there. Prob’ly lookin’ at all them dead, messed-up faces and playin’ with hisself! Somebody ought to go in there and tell him to—”

  The laughter swelled again. Emiliano flinched; the noise now reminded him of the cry of a boy he’d once gut-stabbed in a knife fight. The laughter broke and burbled, became a soft cooing that made Cecily think of the sounds the addicts made in the shooting gallery she frequented. Her face was frozen until the laughter went away, and then she said, “I believe I’ve got things to do.” She turned away and hurried to the ticket booth, where she locked the door. She’d figured that the guy inside the theater was going to be weird when she saw him: He was a big, husky Swedish-looking man with curly blond hair, milk-white skin and eyes like cigarette burns. As he bought his ticket he’d stared holes through her and never said a word. Weird, she thought, and she picked up her People magazine with trembling fingers.

  Come on, eight o’clock! Emiliano pleaded. He checked his wrist-watch. In a few minutes, The Face of Death, Part Four would be ending, and Willy, the old drunk of a projectionist, would be changing the reels upstairs for Mondo Bizarro, which showed bondage scenes and such. Maybe the guy would leave when the picture changed. Emiliano sat on his stool and continued reading his Conan comic book, trying to shut off the bad memories that had been stirred up by the laughter from within.

  The red curtains moved. Emiliano hunched his shoulders as if about to be beaten. Then the curtains parted, and the man who liked movies emerged into the dingy lobby. He’s leaving! Emiliano almost grinned, his gaze glued to the comic book. He’s goin’ out the door!

  But the man who liked movies said in a soft, almost childlike voice, “I’d like a large Coke and a tub of buttered popcorn, please.”

  Emiliano’s stomach clenched. Without letting himself look into the man’s face, he got off his stool, drew the Coke into a cup from the dispenser, got the popcorn and splashed butter into it.

  “More butter, please,” the man who liked movies requested.

  Emiliano gave the popcorn another drool of butter and slid it and the Coke across the counter. “Three bucks,” he said. A five dollar bill was pushed toward him. “Keep the change,” the man said, and this time his voice had a Southern accent. Startled, Emiliano looked up.

  The man who liked movies stood about six four and was wearing a yellow T-shirt and green khaki trousers. Under thick black eyebrows, his eyes were hypnotically green against the amber hue of his flesh. Emiliano had already figured him to be South American as soon as he’d walked in, maybe with some Indian blood in him, too. The man’s hair was black and wavy, cut close to the skull. He stared fixedly at Emiliano. “I want to see the movie again,” he said quietly, and his voice carried what might’ve been a Brazilian accent again.

  “Uh ... Mondo Bizarro’s about to come on in a coupla minutes. Projection guy’s prob’ly got the first reel on—”

  “No,” the man who liked movies said, and he smiled slightly. “I want to see that movie again. Right now.”

  “Yeah. Well, listen. I mean ... I don’t make the decisions here, right? Y’know? I just work behind the counter. I don’t have any say-so about—” And then the man reached out and touched Emiliano’s face with cold, butter-smeared fingers, and Emiliano’s jaw seized up as if it had frozen solid.

  The world seemed to spin around him for a second, and his bones were a cage of ice. Then he blinked and his whole body trembled, and he was standing behind the counter and the man who liked movies was gone. Damn! he thought. Bastard touched me! He grabbed a paper napkin and wiped his face where the fingers had been, but he could still feel the chill they’d left. The five dollar bill remained on the countertop. He put it in his pocket and came out from behind the counter, and he peeked through the curtains into the theater.

  On the screen, in glorious and gory color, were blackened corpses being pulled from the wreckage of cars by firemen. The narrator was saying, “Face of Death will pull no punches. Everything you see will be real. If you are in any way squeamish, you should now be on your way out....”

  The man who liked movies was sitting in the front row. Emiliano could see the outline of his head against the screen. The laughter began, and as Emiliano backpedaled away from the curtains he looked dumbly at his wristwatch and realized that almost twenty minutes of his life was a black hole. He went through a door and up a flight of stairs to the projection booth, where Willy sat sprawled on a couch reading Hustler.

  “Hey!” Emiliano said. “What’s goin’ on, man? How come you showin’ that shit again?”

  Willy stared at him for a moment over the edge of the magazine. “You lost your marbles, kid?” he inquired. “You and your friend just come up here and asked me to. Wasn’t fifteen minutes ago. So I put it back on. Don’t mean shit to me, one way or the other. Anyway, I don’t argue with no old perverts.”

  “Old perverts? What’re you talkin’ about, man?”

  “Your friend,” Willy said. “Guy must be seventy years old. Beard makes him look like Rip Van Winkle. Where do these perverts come from?”

  “You’re ... crazy,” Emiliano whispered. Willy shrugged and returned to his reading.

  Outside, Cecily looked up as Emiliano ran into the street. He glanced back at her, shouted, “I ain’t stayin’ in there! No way! I quit!” and ran away along Forty-second Street and into the gloom. Cecily crossed herself, rechecked the lock on the ticket booth’s door and prayed for dawn.

  In his seat in the front row, the man who liked movies dug a hand into his buttered popcorn and stuffed his mouth full. Before him were scenes of broken bodies being extracted from the rubble of a London building bombed by Irish terrorists. He cocked his head to one side, appreciating the sight of crushed bones and blood. The camera, blurred and unsteady, focused on the frantic face of a young woman as she cradled a dead child.

  The man who liked movies laughed as if he were watching a comedy. In the sound of that laughter was the shriek of napalm
bombs, incendiary rockets and Tomahawk missiles; it echoed through the theater, and if other people had been sitting there each one would have squirmed with the memory of a private terror.

  And in the reflected light from the screen, the man’s face was undergoing a transformation. No longer did he look Swedish, or Brazilian, or have a gray Rip Van Winkle beard; his facial features were running together like the slow melting of a wax mask, the bones shifting beneath the skin. The features of a hundred faces rose and fell like suppurating sores. As the screen showed an autopsy in close-up progress, the man clapped his hands together with merry glee.

  Almost time! he thought. Almost time for the show to start!

  He’d been waiting a long time for the curtain to rise, had worn many skins and many faces, and the moment was soon, very soon. He’d watched the lurch toward destruction through many eyes, had smelled fire and smoke and blood in the air like intoxicating perfumes. The moment was soon, and the moment would belong to him.

  Oh, yes! Almost time for the show to start!

  He was a creature of patience, but now he could hardly keep himself from dancing. Maybe a little Watusi up the aisle would be in order, and then he’d slamdance that cockroach behind the candy counter. It was like waiting for a birthday party, and when the candles were lit he would rear his head back and roar loud enough to stagger God.

  Almost time! Almost time!

  But where would it start? he wondered. Who would push the first button? No matter; he could almost hear the fuse crackling and the flame drawing near. It was the music of the Golan Heights, of Beirut and Teheran, of Dublin and Warsaw, Johannesburg and Vietnam—only this time the music would end in a final, deafening crescendo.

  He stuffed popcorn into a mouth that opened greedily on his right cheek. Party down! he thought, and he giggled with a noise like grinding glass.

  Last night he’d stepped off a Trailways bus from Philadelphia and, strolling down Forty-second Street, had seen that this film was playing. He took the opportunity to admire his performances in The Face of Death, Part Four whenever he could. Just in the background, of course, always part of the crowd, but he could always recognize himself. There was a good shot of him standing over a mass of corpses after the bombing of an Italian soccer stadium, looking suitably shocked; another brief glimpse showed him, wearing a different face, at an airport massacre in Paris.