Swan Song

by Robert R. McCammon

  Lately he’d been on tour, riding the bus from city to city, seeing America. There were so many terrorist groups and armed firebrands in Europe that his influence was hardly needed, though he’d enjoyed helping plant that nice potent bomb in Beirut. He’d stayed a while in Washington, but none of the theaters were showing The Face of Death, Part Four there. Still, Washington held so many possibilities, and when you mixed and mingled with Pentagon boys and cabinet members at some of those parties you never knew what you might stir up.

  It was all coming around to him now. He sensed the nervous fingers hovering near red buttons all over the world. Jet pilots would be scrambling, submarine commanders would be listening to their sonars, and old lions would be eager to bite. And the amazing thing was that they were doing it all themselves. It almost made him feel useless—but his starring role was coming around very soon.

  His only concern was that it wouldn’t be finished yet, not even with all the lightning soon to strike. There might still be pockets of humanity left, and small towns struggling to survive in the dark like rats in a collapsed basement. He understood very well that the firestorms, the whirlwinds of radiation and black rain would destroy most of them, and the ones that remained would wish they were dead a thousand times over.

  And in the end, he would Watusi on their graves, too.

  It was almost time. Tick tock tick tock, he thought. Nothing ever stops the clock!

  He was a patient creature, but it had been a long wait. A few more hours would only whet his appetite, and he was very, very hungry. For the time being, he could enjoy watching himself in this fine film.

  Curtain’s going up! he thought, and the mouth in the center of his forehead grinned before it disappeared into the flesh like a gray worm in damp ground.

  It’s showtime!

  7

  10:16 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time

  NEW YORK CITY

  A BLUE LIGHT WAS SPINNING. Cold rain came down, and a young man in a yellow rain slicker reached out his arms. “Give her to me, lady,” he said, his voice as hollow as if he were speaking from the bottom of a well. “Come on. Let me have her.”

  “NO!” Sister Creep shouted, and the man’s face fragmented into pieces like the shattering of a mirror. She thrust out her hands to push it away, but then she was sitting up and the nightmare was whirling away in pieces like silver bats. The sound of her cry echoed back and forth between the walls of rough gray brick, and she sat staring at nothing for a moment as the sputtering of nerves shook her body.

  Oh, she thought when her head cleared, that was a bad one! She touched her clammy forehead and her fingers came away damp. That was close, she thought. The young demon in the yellow raincoat was there again, very near, and he almost got my ...

  She frowned. Got my what? The thought was gone now; whatever it had been, it had flipped over to the dark side of her memory. She often dreamed of the demon in the yellow raincoat, and he was always wanting her to give him something. In the dream, a blue light was always flashing, hurting her eyes, and rain was hitting her in the face. Sometimes the surroundings seemed terribly familiar, and sometimes she almost—almost—knew what it was he wanted, but she knew he was a demon—or probably the Devil himself, trying to pull her away from Jesus—because her head pounded so badly after the dream was over.

  She didn’t know what time it was, or whether it was day or night, but her stomach was rumbling with hunger. She had tried to sleep on a subway bench, but the noise of some shouting kids scared her, so she’d trundled off with her bag in search of a more secure place. She’d found it at the bottom of a ladder that descended in a darkened section of subway tunnel. About thirty feet beneath the main tunnel was a drainage pipe, large enough for her to move through if she stooped over. Dirty water streamed past her sneakers, and the tunnel was illuminated by an occasional blue utility lamp that showed the network of cables and pipes just overhead. The tunnel shook with the thunder of a subway train passing, and Sister Creep realized she was under the rails; but as she continued along the tunnel the noise of the trains faded to a polite, distant growl. She soon found evidence that this was a popular place for members of the Ragtag Nation—a beat-up old mattress pushed back into a cubbyhole, a couple of empty wine bottles and some dried human excrement. She didn’t mind; she’d seen worse. And so she’d slept on the mattress until the nightmare of the demon in the yellow raincoat had awakened her; she was hungry, and she decided she’d climb back up to the subway station to search for scraps in the garbage cans, maybe try to find a newspaper, too, to see if Jesus had come while she was sleeping.

  Sister Creep stood up, put the strap of her bag around her shoulder and left the cubbyhole. She started back along the tunnel, tinged by the dim blue glow of the utility bulbs, and hoped she’d find a hot dog today. She’d always been fond of hot dogs, with plenty of good spicy mus—

  The tunnel suddenly trembled.

  She heard the sound of concrete cracking. The blue lamps flickered, went dark and then brightened again. There was a noise like the howl of wind, or a runaway subway train speeding overhead. The blue lamps continued to brighten until the light was almost blinding, and Sister Creep squinted in the glare. She took three more uncertain steps forward; the utility bulbs began to explode. She put her hands up to shield her face, felt pieces of glass strike her arms, and she thought with sudden clarity: I’ll sue somebody for this!

  In the next instant the entire tunnel whipped violently to one side, and Sister Creep fell into the stream of dirty water. Chunks of concrete and rock dust cascaded from the ceiling. The tunnel whipped back in the other direction with a force that made Sister Creep think her insides were tearing loose, and the concrete chunks hit her head and shoulders as her nostrils filled with grit. “Lord Jesus!” she shouted, about to choke. “Oh, Lord Jesus!”

  Sparks shot overhead as the cables began to rip free. She smelled the wet heat of steam and heard a pounding noise like the footsteps of a behemoth treading above her head. As the tunnel pitched and swayed Sister Creep clung to her bag, riding out the gut-twisting undulations, a scream straining behind her clenched teeth. A wave of heat passed over her, stealing her breath. God help me! she shrieked in her mind as she struggled for air. She heard something pop and tasted blood streaming from her nose. I can’t breathe, oh sweet Jesus, I can’t breathe! She gripped at her throat, opened her mouth and heard her own strangled scream wail away from her through the shivering tunnel. Finally her tortured lungs dragged in a breath of scorched air, and she lay curled up on her side in the darkness, her body racked with spasms and her brain shocked numb.

  The violent twisting motion of the tunnel had stopped. Sister Creep drifted in and out of consciousness, and through the haze came the distant roar of that runaway subway train again.

  Only now it was getting louder.

  Get up! she told herself. Get up! It’s Judgment Day, and the Lord has come in His chariot to take the righteous up into the Rapture!

  But a calmer, clearer voice spoke, perhaps from the dark side of her memory, and it said: Bullshit! Something bad’s happened up there!

  Rapture! Rapture! Rapture! she thought, forcing the wicked voice away. She sat up, wiped blood from her nose and drew in steamy, stifling air. The noise of the runaway train was closer. Sister Creep realized that the water she was sitting in had gotten hot. She grasped her bag and slowly rose to her feet. Everything was dark, and when Sister Creep felt the tunnel’s walls her fingers found a crazy quilt of cracks and fissures.

  The roaring was much louder, and the air was heating up. The concrete against her fingers felt like city pavement at noon in August, ready to fry eggs sunny side up.

  Far away along the tunnel there was a flicker of orange light, like the headlamp on a speeding subway train. The tunnel had begun to tremble again. Sister Creep stared, her face tightening, as the orange light grew brighter, showing streaks of incandescent red and purple.

  She realized then what it was, and she moaned like a t
rapped animal.

  A blast of fire was roaring toward her along the tunnel, and she could already feel the rush of air being sucked into it as if into a vacuum. In less than a minute it would be upon her.

  Sister Creep’s trance snapped. She turned and fled, holding her bag close, her sneakers splashing through steaming water. She leaped broken pipes and pushed aside fallen cables with the frenzy of the doomed. She looked back and saw the flames shooting out red tendrils that snapped in the air like whips. The vacuum suction pulled at her, trying to draw her backward into the fire, and when she screamed the air sizzled in her nostrils and at the back of her throat.

  She could smell burning hair, felt her back and arms rippling with blisters. In maybe thirty seconds she’d be joining her Lord and Master, and it astounded her that she wasn’t ready and willing to go.

  With a startled cry of terror, she suddenly tripped and fell headlong to the floor.

  As she started to scramble up she saw she’d tripped over a grate into which the stream was draining. Beneath the grate was only darkness. She looked at the onrushing fire, and her eyebrows singed, her face broke into oozing blisters. The air was unbreathable. There was no time to get up and run; the fire was almost upon her.

  She gripped the bars of the grate and wrenched upward. One of the grate’s rusted screws snapped, but the second held tight.

  The flames were less than forty feet away, and Sister Creep’s hair caught fire.

  God help me! she screamed inwardly, and she pulled upward on the grate so hard she felt her shoulders almost rip loose from their sockets.

  The second screw snapped.

  Sister Creep flung the grate aside, had a second to grab her bag, then lunged headfirst into the hole.

  She fell about four feet into a coffin-sized space that held eight inches of water.

  The flames passed overhead, sucking the air from her lungs and scorching every inch of her exposed skin. Her clothes burst into flame, and she rolled frantically in the water. For a few seconds there was nothing but the roaring and the agony, and she smelled the odor of hot dogs being boiled in a vendor’s cart.

  The wall of fire moved on like a comet, and in its wake returned a whooosh of outside air that carried the thick smell of charred flesh and molten metal.

  Down in the hole that fed drainage water to a sewer pipe, Sister Creep’s body hitched and contorted. Three inches of water had risen as mist and evaporated, blunting the full force of the fire. Her burned, tattered body struggled for a breath, and finally gasped and sputtered, the blistered hands tightly gripping her smoldering canvas bag.

  And then she lay still.

  8

  8:31 A.M. Mountain Daylight Time

  BLUE DOME MOUNTAIN, IDAHO

  THE STEADY BUZZING OF the telephone on the table beside his bed brought the man up from a dreamless sleep. Go away, he thought. Leave me alone. But the buzzing continued, and finally he slowly turned over, switched on the lamp and, squinting in the light, picked up the receiver. “Macklin,” he said, his voice slurred and sleepy.

  “Uh ... Colonel, sir?” It was Sergeant Schorr. “I’ve got some people in orientation waiting to meet you, sir.”

  Colonel James “Jimbo” Macklin looked at the little green alarm clock next to the phone and saw he was more than thirty minutes late for the orientation and hand-shaking session. Damn it to Hell! he thought. I set that alarm for 0630 sharp! “All right, Sergeant. Keep them there another fifteen minutes.” He hung up and then checked the back of the alarm clock; he saw that the little lever was still pressed down. Either he’d never set the alarm or he’d turned it off in his sleep. He sat on the edge of the bed, trying to summon the energy to get up, but his body felt sluggish and bloated; years ago, he mused grimly, he’d never needed an alarm clock to wake him: He could’ve been snapped out of sleep by the sound of a footstep in wet grass and he would’ve been as alert as a wolf within seconds.

  Passing time, he thought. Long gone.

  He willed himself to stand up. Willed himself to walk across the bedroom, its walls decorated with photographs of Phantom and Thunderchief jets in flight, and walked into the small bathroom. He switched on the light and ran water into the sink; it came out rusty. He splashed the water on his face, dried himself with a towel and stood staring bleary-eyed at the stranger in the mirror.

  Macklin stood six foot two, and until five or six years ago his body had been lean and hard, his ribs covered with muscle, his shoulders strong and straight, his chest thrust out like Chobham armor on the snout of an M-l tank. Now the definitions of his body were blurred by loose flesh, and his potbelly resisted the fifty situps he did every morning—that is, when he had time to do them. He detected a stoop in his shoulders, as if he were being bowed by an invisible weight, and the hair on his chest was sprinkled with gray. His biceps, once rock-hard, had deteriorated into flab. He’d once broken the neck of a Libyan soldier in the crook of his arm; now he didn’t feel as if he had the strength to crack a walnut with a sledgehammer.

  He plugged in his electric razor and guided it over the stubble on his jaw. His dark brown hair was clipped in a severe crewcut, showing flecks of gray at the temples; beneath a square slab of a forehead, his eyes were frosty blue and sunken in deep hollows of fatigue, like bits of ice floating on muddy water. As he shaved Macklin thought that his face had come to resemble any one of the hundreds of battlefield maps he’d pored over long ago: the jutting cliff of his chin leading to the rugged ravine of his mouth, up to the highlands of his chiseled cheekbones and the craggy ridge of his nose, down again into the swamps of his eyes, then an upward sweep into the brown forests of his thick eyebrows. And all the terrain marks were there, as well: the pockmark craters of the severe acne he’d had as an adolescent, the small trench of a scar zigzagging through his left eyebrow, compliments of a ricocheting bullet in Angola. Across his left shoulder blade was a deeper and longer scar carved by a knife in Iraq, and a reminder of a Viet Cong bullet puckered the skin over the right side of his rib cage. Macklin was forty-four years old, but sometimes he awakened feeling seventy, with shooting pains in his arms and legs from bones that had been broken in battles on distant shores.

  He finished shaving and drew aside the shower curtain to run the water, then he stopped, because littering the bottom of the small shower stall were ceiling tiles and bits of rubble. Water was dripping from a series of holes where the shower stall ceiling had given way. As he stared at the leaking water, realizing he was running late and could not take a shower, anger suddenly rose within him like molten iron in a blast furnace; he slammed his fist against the wall once, and then again; the second time, the force of his blow left a network of minute cracks.

  He leaned over the sink, waiting for the rage to pass, as it usually did. “Steady,” he told himself. “Discipline and control. Discipline and control.” He repeated it a few more times, like a mantra, drew a long, deep breath and straightened up. Time to go, he thought. They’re waiting for me. He used his stick deodorant under his arms, then went out to the bedroom closet to choose his uniform.

  He picked a pair of crisply pressed dark blue trousers, a light blue shirt and his beige poplin flight jacket with leather patches on the elbows and MACKLIN printed across the breast pocket. He reached up to the overhead shelf, where he kept a case containing his Ingram gun and ammo clips, and lovingly took his Air Force colonel’s cap down; he brushed an imaginary bit of lint off the polished brim and put the cap on his head. He checked himself in the full-length mirror on the back of the closet door: buttons polished, check; trousers creased, check; shoes shining, check. He straightened his collar, and then he was ready to go.

  His private electric cart was parked outside his quarters on the Command Center Level; he locked his door with one of the many keys he carried on a key chain, then got into the cart and drove along the corridor. Behind him, past his own quarters, was the sealed metal door of the weapons storage room and the emergency food and water supply. Down at the oth
er end of the corridor, past the quarters of other Earth House technicians and employees, was the generator room and the air-filtration system controls. He passed the door of Perimeter Control, which contained the screens of the small portable battlefield surveillance radars set out to guard the entry to Earth House, and the main screen of the skyward-trained radar dish that sat atop Blue Dome Mountain. Within Perimeter Control was also the hydraulic system that sealed the air vents and the lead-lined doorway in the event of a nuclear attack, and the various radar screens were manned around the clock.

  Macklin guided the cart up a ramp to the next level and headed for the Town Hall. He passed the open doors of the gymnasium, where an aerobics class was in session. A few morning joggers were running in the corridor, and Macklin nodded at them as he sped past. Then he was in the wider corridor of Earth House’s Town Square, a junction of hallways with a rock garden at its center. All around were various “shops” with storefronts made to resemble those in a country town. Earth House’s Town Square contained a tanning salon, a theater where videotaped movies were shown, a library, an infirmary staffed by a doctor and two nurses, a game arcade and a cafeteria. Macklin caught the aroma of bacon and eggs as he drove past the cafeteria’s doors and wished he’d had time for breakfast. It was not his way to be late. Discipline and control, he thought. Those were the two things that made a man.

  But he was still angry about the collapsed ceiling in his shower stall. Lately, it seemed that the walls and ceiling in several areas of Earth House were cracking and giving way. He’d called the Ausley brothers many times, but they’d told him the structural reports showed settling was to be expected. Settling, my ass! Macklin had said. We’ve got a water drainage problem here! Water’s collecting over the ceilings and leaking through!