Swan Song

by Robert R. McCammon

  She touched the edge of the tunnel floor, at a level just above her stomach’s bulge. She was going to have to pull herself out by sheer strength. Her shoulders were still throbbing from the effort of tearing the grate loose, but that pain was nothing compared to the suffering of her blistered skin. Sister Creep tossed the canvas bag up; sooner or later she’d have to force herself to climb out and get it. She placed her palms on the concrete and tensed herself to push upward, but her willpower evaporated, and she stood there thinking that some maintenance man was going to come down here in a year or two and find a skeleton where a living woman had once been.

  She pushed upward. The strained muscles of her shoulders shrieked with pain, and one elbow threatened to give way. But as she started to topple backward into the hole she brought a knee up and got it on the edge, then got the other knee up. Blisters burst on her arms and legs with little wet popping sounds. She scrabbled over the edge like a crab and lay on her stomach on the tunnel floor, dizzy and breathing heavily, her hands again clutching the bag.

  Get up, she thought. Get moving, you slob bucket, or you’re going to die here.

  She stood up, holding her bag protectively in front of her, and began to stumble through the darkness; her legs were stiff as chunks of wood, and several times she fell over rubble or broken cables. But she paused only long enough to catch her breath and fight back the pain, and then she struggled to her feet and went on.

  She bumped into a ladder and climbed it, but the shaft was blocked by cables, chunks of concrete and pipe; she returned to the tunnel and kept going in search of a way out. In some places the air was hot and thin, and she took little gulps of breath to keep from passing out. She felt her way along the tunnel, came to dead ends of jumbled debris and had to retrace her path, found other ladders that ascended to blocked shafts or manhole covers that refused to be budged. Her mind battered back and forth like a caged animal. One step at a time, she told herself. One step and then the next gets you where you’re going.

  Blisters rose and fell on her face, arms and legs. She stopped and sat down for a while to rest, her lungs wheezing in the heavy air. There were no sounds of subway trains or cars or burning sinners. Something terrible’s happened up there, she thought. Not the Rapture, not the Second Coming—something terrible.

  Sister Creep forced herself onward. One step at a time. One step and then the next.

  She found another ladder and looked up. About twenty feet above, at the top of the shaft, was a half moon of murky light. She climbed up until she was near enough to touch a manhole cover, shaken two inches out of its socket by the same shock wave that had made the tunnel vibrate. She got the fingers of one hand in between the iron and the concrete and shoved the manhole cover out of the way.

  The light was the color of dried blood, and as hazy as if filtered through layers of thick gauze. Still, she had to squint until her eyes were used to light again.

  She was looking up at the sky, but a kind of sky she’d never seen before: dirty brown clouds were spinning over Manhattan, and flickers of blue lightning crackled out of them. A hot, bitter wind swirled into her face, the force of it almost knocking her loose from the ladder. In the distance there was the rumble of thunder, but a different kind of thunder than she’d ever heard—this sounded like a sledgehammer banging iron. The wind made a howling noise as it swept into the manhole, pushing her backward, but she pulled herself and her bag up the last two rungs of the ladder and crawled into the outside world again.

  The wind blew a storm of grit into her face, and she was blinded for a few seconds. When her vision cleared again, she saw that she had come out of the tunnel into what looked like a junkyard.

  Around her were the crushed hulks of cars, taxis and trucks, some of them melted together to form strange sculptures of metal. The tires on some of the vehicles were still smoking, while others had dissolved into black puddles. Gaping fissures had burst open in the pavement, some of them five and six feet wide; through many of the cracks came gouts of steam or water like gushing geysers. She looked around, dazed and uncomprehending, her eyes slitted against the gritty wind. In some places the earth had collapsed, and in others there were mountains of rubble, miniature Everests of metal, stone and glass. Between them the wind shrieked and turned, spun and rose around the fragments of buildings, many of which had been shaken apart right to their steel skeletons, which in turn were warped and bent like licorice sticks. Curtains of dense smoke from burning buildings and heaps of debris napped before the rushing wind, and lightning streaked to earth from the black heart of roiling, immense clouds. She couldn’t see the sun, couldn’t even tell where it lay in the turbulent sky. She looked for the Empire State Building, but there were no more skyscrapers; all the buildings she could see had been sheared off, though she couldn’t tell if the Empire State was still standing or not because of the smoke and dust. It was not Manhattan anymore, but a ravaged junkyard of rubble mountains and smoke-filled ravines.

  Judgment of God, she thought. God has struck down an evil city, has swept all the sinners down to burn in Hell forever! Crazy laughter rang out inside her, and as she lifted her face toward the dirty clouds the fluids of burst blisters streamed down her cheeks.

  A spear of lightning hit the exposed framework of a nearby building, and sparks danced madly in the air. Beyond the rise of a huge mountain of debris, Sister Creep could see the funnel of a tornado in the distance, and another one writhing to the right. Up in the clouds, fiery things were being tossed like red balls in the hands of a juggler. All gone, all destroyed, she thought. The end of the world. Praise God! Praise blessed Jesus! The end of the world, and all the sinners burning in—

  She clasped her hands over her ears and screamed. Something inside her brain cracked like a funhouse mirror that existed only to reflect a distorted world, and as the fragments of the funhouse mirror fell apart other images were revealed behind it: herself as a younger, more attractive woman, pushing a stroller in a shopping mall; a suburban brick house with a small green yard and a station wagon in the driveway; a town with a main street and a statue in the square; faces, some of them dark and indistinct, others just on the edge of memory; and then the blue flashing lights and the rain and the demon in a yellow raincoat, reaching out and saying, “Give her to me, lady. It’s okay, just give her to me now....”

  All gone, all destroyed! Judgment of God! Praise Jesus!

  “Just give her to me now....”

  No, she thought. No!

  All gone, all destroyed! All the sinners, burning in Hell!

  No! No! No!

  And then she opened her mouth and shrieked because everything was gone and destroyed in fire and ruin, and in that instant she realized no God of Creation would destroy His masterpiece in one fit of flame like a petulant child. This was not Judgment Day, or Rapture, or the Second Coming—this had nothing to do with God; this was utter, evil destruction without sense or purpose or sanity.

  For the first time since crawling out of the manhole Sister Creep looked at her blistered hands and arms, at the tattered rags of her clothing. Her skin was splotched with angry red burns, the blisters stretched tight with yellow fluid. Her bag was just barely held together by scraps of canvas, her belongings spilling out through burned holes. And then around her, in the pall of dust and smoke, she saw other things that at first her mind had not let her see: flattened, charred things that could only remotely be recognized as human remains. A pile of them lay almost at her feet, as if heaped there by someone sweeping out a coal scuttle. They littered the street, lay half in and half out of the crushed cars and taxis; here was one wrapped around the remnants of a bicycle, there was another with its teeth showing startlingly white against the crisped, featureless face. Hundreds of them lay around her, their bones melded into shapes of surrealistic horror.

  Lightning flashed, and the wind wailed with a banshee voice of the dead around Sister Creep’s ears.

  She ran.

  The wind whipped into her fa
ce, blinding her with smoke, dust and ashes. She ducked her head, hobbling up the side of a rubble mountain, and she realized she’d left her bag behind but she couldn’t bear returning to that valley of the dead. She tripped over debris, dislodging an avalanche of junk that cascaded around her legs—shattered television sets and stereo equipment, the melted mess of home computers, ghetto blasters, radios, the burned rags of men’s silk suits and women’s designer dresses, broken fragments of fine furniture, charred books, antique silverware reduced to chunks of metal. And everywhere there were more smashed vehicles and bodies buried in the wreckage—hundreds of bodies and pieces of bodies, arms and legs protruding from the debris as stiffly as those of department store mannequins. She reached the top of the mountain, where the hot wind was so fierce she had to fall to her knees to keep from being thrown off. Looking in all directions, she saw the full extent of the disaster: To the north, the few remaining trees in Central Park were burning, and fires extended all along what had been Eighth Avenue, glowing like blood-red rubies behind the curtain of smoke; to the east, there was no sign of Rockefeller Center or Grand Central Station, just shattered structures rising up like rotten teeth from a diseased jaw; to the south, the Empire State Building seemed to be gone, too, and the funnel of a tornado danced near Wall Street; to the west, ridges of debris marched all the way to the Hudson River. The panorama of destruction was both a pinnacle of horror and a numbing of it, because her mind reached the limit of its ability to accept and process shock and began flipping out memories of cartoons and comedies she’d seen as a child: Jetsons, Huckleberry Hound, Mighty Mouse and Three Stooges. She crouched at the top of the mountain in the grip of a shrieking wind and stared dumbly out at the ruins while a hideous fixed smile stretched her mouth, and only one sane thought got through: Oh my Jesus, what’s happened to the magic place?

  And the answer was: All gone, all destroyed.

  “Get up,” she said to herself, though the wind swept her voice away. “Get up. You think you’re gonna stay here? You can’t stay here! Get up, and take one step at a time. One step and then the next gets you where you’re going.”

  But it was a long time before she could move again, and she stumbled down the far side of the rubble mountain like an old woman, muttering to herself.

  She didn’t know where she was going, nor did she particularly care. The intensity of the lightning increased, and thunder shook the ground; a black, nasty-looking drizzle began to fall from the clouds, blowing like needles before the howling wind. Sister Creep stumbled from one mountain of wreckage to the next. Off in the distance she thought she heard a woman screaming, and she called out but wasn’t answered. The rain fell harder, and the wind blew into her face like a slap.

  And then—she didn’t know how much longer it was—she came down a ridge of debris and stopped in her tracks beside the crushed remnant of a yellow cab. A street sign stood nearby, bent almost into a knot, and it said Forty-second. Of all the buildings along the street, only one was standing.

  The marquee above the Empire State Theater was still blinking, advertising Face of Death, Part Four and Mondo Bizarro. On both sides of the theater building, the structures had been reduced to burned-out shells, but the theater itself wasn’t even scorched. She remembered passing that theater the night before, and the brutal shove that had knocked her into the street. Smoke passed between her and the theater, and she expected the building to be gone like a mirage in the next second, but when the smoke whipped on the theater was still there, and the marquee was still blinking merrily.

  Turn away, she told herself. Get the hell out of here!

  But she took one step toward it, and then the next got her where she was going. She stood in front of the theater doors and smelled buttered popcorn from within. No! she thought. It’s not possible!

  But it was not possible, either, that the city of New York should be turned into a tornado-swept wasteland in a handful of hours. Staring at those theater doors, Sister Creep knew that the rules of this world had been suddenly and drastically changed by a force she couldn’t even begin to understand. “I’m crazy,” she told herself. But the theater was real, and so was the aroma of buttered popcorn. She peered into the ticket booth, but it was empty; then she braced herself, touched the crucifix and gemclip chain that hung around her neck, and went through the doors.

  There was no one behind the concession counter, but Sister Creep could hear the movie going on in the auditorium behind a faded red curtain; there was the grating sound of a car crash, and then a narrator’s voice intoning, “And here before your eyes is the result of a head-on collision at sixty miles an hour.”

  Sister Creep reached over the counter, grabbed two Hershey bars from the display, and was about to eat one when she heard the snarl of an animal.

  The sound rose, reaching the register of a human laugh. But in it Sister Creep heard the squeal of tires on a rain-slick highway and a child’s piercing, heartbreaking scream: “Mommy!”

  She clapped her hands over her ears until the child’s cry was gone, and she stood shivering until all memory of it had faded. The laughter was gone, too, but whoever had made it was still sitting in there, watching a movie in the middle of a destroyed city.

  She crammed half a Hershey bar into her mouth, chewed and swallowed it. Behind the red curtain, the narrator was talking about rapes and murders with cool, clinical detachment. The curtain beckoned her. She ate the other half of the Hershey bar and licked her fingers. If that awful laughter swelled again, she thought, she might lose her mind, but she had to see who had made it. She walked to the curtain and slowly, slowly, drew it aside.

  On the screen was the bruised, dead face of a young woman, but such a sight held no power to shock Sister Creep anymore. She could see the outline of a head—someone sitting up in the front row, face tilted upward at the screen. The rest of the seats were empty. Sister Creep stared at that head, could not see the face and didn’t want to, because whoever—whatever—it was couldn’t possibly be human.

  The head suddenly swiveled toward her.

  Sister Creep drew back. Her legs wanted to run, but she didn’t let them go. The figure in the front row was just staring at her as the film continued to show close-ups of people lying on coroners’ slabs. And then the figure stood up from the seat, and Sister Creep heard popcorn crunch on the floor beneath its shoes. Run! she screamed inwardly. Get out! But she stood her ground, and the figure stopped before its face was revealed by the light from the concession counter.

  “You’re all burned up.” It was the soft and pleasant voice of a young man. He was thin and tall, about six feet four or five, dressed in a pair of dark green khaki trousers and a yellow T-shirt. On his feet were polished combat boots. “I guess it’s over out there by now, isn’t it?”

  “All gone,” she murmured. “All destroyed.” She caught a dank chill, the same thing she’d experienced the previous night in front of the theater, and then it was gone. She could see the faintest impression of features on the man’s face, and she thought she saw him smile, but it was a terrible smile; his mouth didn’t seem to be exactly where it should. “I think ... everyone’s dead,” she told him.

  “Not everyone,” he corrected. “You’re not dead, are you? And I think there are others still alive out there, too. Hiding somewhere, probably. Waiting to die. It won’t be long, though. Not long for you, either.”

  “I’m not dead yet,” she said.

  “You might as well be.” His chest expanded as he drew in a deep breath. “Smell that air! Isn’t it sweet?”

  Sister Creep started to take a backward step. The man said, almost gently, “No,” and she stopped as if the most important—the only important—thing in the world was to obey.

  “My best scene’s coming up.” He motioned toward the screen, where flames shot out of a building and broken bodies were lying on stretchers. “That’s me! Standing by the car! Well, I didn’t say it was a long scene.” His attention drifted back to her. “Oh,” he
said softly. “I like your necklace.” His pale hand with its long, slender fingers slid toward her throat.

  She wanted to cringe away because she couldn’t bear to be touched by that hand, but she was transfixed by his voice, echoing back and forth in her mind. She flinched as the cold fingers touched the crucifix. He pulled at it, but both the crucifix and the gemclip chain were sealed to her skin.

  “It’s burned on,” the man said. “We’ll fix that.”

  With a quick snap of his wrist he ripped the crucifix and chain off, taking Sister Creep’s skin with it. Pain shot through her like an electric shock, at the same time breaking up the echo of the man’s command and clearing her head. Tears burned fiery trails down her cheeks.

  The man held his hand palm up, the crucifix and chain dangling before Sister Creep’s face. He began to sing in the voice of a little boy: “Here we go ’round the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush ...”

  His palm caught fire, the flames crawling up along his fingers. As the man’s hand became a glove of flame the crucifix and chain began to melt and dribble to the floor.

  “Here we go ’round the mulberry bush, so early in the morrrrn-ing!”

  Sister Creep looked into his face. By the light of the flaming hand she could see the shifting bones, the melting cheeks and lips, eyes of different colors surfacing where there were no sockets.

  The last droplet of molten metal spattered to the floor. A mouth opened across the man’s chin like a red-rimmed wound. The mouth grinned. “Lights out!” it whispered.