Swan Song

by Robert R. McCammon

  He felt nothing beyond the excruciating manacle at his wrist. His hand and fingers were dead meat. Have to learn to be a southpaw, he thought. And then a realization hit him with stunning force: My trigger finger’s gone.

  “Corporal Prados is up here with me, Colonel!” Warner called down. “He’s got a broken leg, but he’s conscious. The others are in worse shape—or dead.”

  “How about you?” Macklin asked.

  “My back’s wrenched all to hell.” Warner sounded as if he were having trouble getting a breath. “Feel like I’d split apart if my balls weren’t holding me together. Spitting up some blood, too.”

  “Anybody left to get a damage report?”

  “Intercom’s out. Smoke’s coming from the vents. I can hear people screaming somewhere, so some of them made it. Jesus, Colonel! The whole mountain must’ve moved!”

  “I’ve got to get out of here,” Macklin said. “My arm’s pinned, Teddy.” Thinking about the mangled mess of his hand brought the pain up again, and he had to grit his teeth and wait it through. “Can you help me get out?”

  “How? I can’t reach you, and if your arm’s pinned ...”

  “My hand’s crushed,” Macklin told him; his voice was calm, and he felt he was in a dream state, everything floating and unreal. “Get me a knife. The sharpest knife you can find.”

  “What? A knife? What for?”

  Macklin grinned savagely. “Just do it. Then get a fire going up there and char me a piece of wood.” He was oddly dissociated from what he was saying, as if what had to be done concerned the flesh of another man. “The wood has to be red hot, Teddy. Hot enough to cauterize a stump.”

  “A ... stump?” He paused. Now he was getting the picture. “Maybe we can get you out some other—”

  “There’s no other way.” To get out of this pit, he would have to leave his hand. Call it a pound of flesh, he thought. “Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, sir,” Warner replied, ever obedient.

  Macklin turned his face away from the light.

  Warner crawled from the edge of the hole that had opened in the control room’s floor. The entire room was tilted at a thirty-degree angle, so he was crawling slightly downhill over broken equipment, fallen rocks and bodies. The flashlight beam caught Corporal Prados, sitting against one cracked and slanting wall; the man’s face was disfigured, and bone gleamed wetly from his thigh. Warner continued into what was left of the corridor. Huge holes had ripped open in the ceiling and walls, water pouring from above onto the mess of rocks and pipes. He could still hear screaming in the distance. He was going to have to find someone to help him free Colonel Mack-lin, because without Macklin’s leadership they were all finished. And there was no way his injured back would let him crawl down into the hole where the colonel was trapped. No, he was going to have to find someone else—someone small enough to fit, but tough enough to get the job done. God only knew what he would find when he crawled up to Level One.

  The colonel was counting on him, and he would not let the colonel down.

  Slowly and painfully, he picked his way over the rubble, crawling in the direction of the screams.

  15

  ROLAND CRONINGER WAS HUDDLED on the crooked floor in the wreckage of what had been Earth House’s cafeteria, and over the wailing and screaming he was listening to one grim inner voice that said, A King’s Knight ... A King’s Knight ... A King’s Knight never cries....

  Everything was dark except for occasional tongues of flame that leaped up where the kitchen had been, and the fitful light illuminated fallen rock, broken tables and chairs, and crushed human bodies. Here and there someone staggered in the gloom like a sufferer in the caverns of Hell, and broken bodies jerked under the massive boulders that had crashed through the ceiling.

  At first there’d been a tremor that had knocked people out of their chairs; the main lights had gone out, but then the emergency floods had switched on, and Roland was on the floor with his breakfast cereal all over the front of his shirt. His mother and father had sprawled near him, and there were maybe forty other people who’d been eating breakfast at the same time; a few of them were already hollering for help, but most were shocked silent. His mother had looked at him, orange juice dripping from her hair and face, and said, “Next year we go to the beach.”

  Roland had laughed, and his father was laughing, too; and then his mother began to laugh, and for a moment they were all connected by that laughter. Phil had managed to say, “Thank God I don’t handle the insurance on this place! I’d have to sue my own—”

  And then he was drowned out by a monstrous roar and the sound of splitting rock, and the floor had heaved and tilted crazily, with such force that Roland was thrown away from his parents and collided with other bodies. A barrage of rocks and ceiling tiles caved in, and something had struck him hard in the head. Now, as he sat with his knees drawn up to his chin, he lifted his hand to his hairline and felt sticky blood. His lower lip was gashed and bleeding, too, and his insides felt deeply bruised, as if his entire body had been stretched like a rubber band and then brutally snapped. He didn’t know how long the earthquake had gone on, or how he’d come to be huddled up like a baby, or where his parents were. He wanted to cry, and there were tears in his eyes, but a King’s Knight never cries, he told himself; that was in the King’s Knight handbook, one of the rules he’d written for the proper conduct of a warrior: A King’s Knight never cries—he just gets even.

  There was something clenched in his right fist, and he opened it: his glasses, the left lens cracked and the right one completely gone. He thought he remembered taking them off, when he was lying under the table, to clean the milk off the lenses. He put them on and tried to stand, but it took a moment to coordinate his legs. When he did stand up, he bumped his head against a buckled ceiling that had been at least seven feet high before the tremors had started. Now he had to crouch to avoid dangling cables and pipes and snapped iron reinforcement rods. “Mom! Dad!” he shouted, but he heard no answer over the cries of the injured. Roland stumbled through the debris calling for his parents, and he stepped on something that gave like a wet sponge. He looked down at what might’ve been a huge starfish caught between two slabs of rock; the body bore no resemblance to anything remotely human, except it did wear the tatters of a bloody shirt.

  Roland stepped over other bodies; he’d seen corpses only in the pictures of his father’s mercenary soldier magazines, but these were different. These were battered featureless and sexless but for the rags of clothes. But none of them were his mother and father, Roland decided; no, his mom and dad were alive, somewhere. He knew they were, and he kept searching. In another moment he stopped just short of plunging into a jagged chasm that had split the cafeteria in two, and he peered into it but saw no bottom. “Mom! Dad!” he shouted to the other side of the room, but again there was no reply.

  Roland stood on the edge of the chasm, his body trembling. One part of him was dumbstruck with terror, but another, deeper part seemed to be strengthening, surging toward the surface, shivering not with fear but with a pure, cold excitement that was beyond anything he’d ever felt before. Surrounded by death, he experienced the pounding of life in his veins with a force that made him feel lightheaded and drunk.

  I’m alive, he thought. Alive.

  And suddenly the wreckage of the Earth House cafeteria seemed to ripple and change; he was standing in the midst of a battlefield strewn with the dead, and fire licked up in the distance from the burning enemy fortress. He was carrying a dented shield and a bloody sword, and he was about to go over the edge into shock, but he was still standing and still alive after the holocaust of battle. He had led a legion of knights into war on this rubbled field, and now he stood alone because he was the last King’s Knight left.

  One of the battered warriors at his feet reached out and grasped his ankle. “Please,” the bloody mouth rasped. “Please help me ...”

  Roland blinked, stunned. He was looking down at a middl
e-aged woman, the lower half of her body caught under a slab of rock. “Please help me,” she begged. “My legs ... oh ... my legs ...”

  A woman wasn’t supposed to be on the battlefield, Roland thought. Oh, no! But then he looked around himself and remembered where he was, and he pulled his ankle free and moved away from the chasm’s edge.

  He kept searching, but he couldn’t find his father or mother. Maybe they were buried, he realized—or maybe they’d gone down into that chasm, down into the darkness below. Maybe he’d seen their bodies but couldn’t recognize them. “Mom! Dad!” he yelled. “Where are you?” No reply, only the sound of someone sobbing and voices in keening agony.

  A light glinted through the smoke and found his face.

  “You,” someone said, in a pained whisper. “What’s your name?”

  “Roland,” he replied. What was his last name? He couldn’t remember it for a few seconds. Then, “Roland Croninger.”

  “I need your help, Roland,” the man with the flashlight said. “Are you able to walk okay?”

  Roland nodded.

  “Colonel Macklin’s trapped down below, in the control room. What’s left of the control room,” Teddybear Warner amended. He was drawn up like a hunchback. He leaned on a piece of reinforcement rod that he was using as a walking stick. Some of the passageways had been completely blocked by rockslides, while others slanted at crazy angles or were split by gaping fissures. Screams and cries for God echoed through Earth House, and some of the walls were bloody where bodies had been battered to death by the shock waves. He had found only a half-dozen able-bodied civilians in the wreckage, and of those only two—an old man and a little girl—weren’t raving mad; but the old man had a snapped wrist through which the bones protruded, and the little girl wouldn’t leave the area where her father had disappeared. So Warner had continued to the cafeteria, looking for someone to help him, and also figuring that the kitchen would hold a useful assortment of knives.

  Now Warner played the beam over Roland’s face. The boy’s forehead was gashed and his eyes were swimming with shock, but he seemed to have escaped major injury. Except for the blood, the boy’s face was pallid and dusty, and his dark blue cotton shirt was ripped and showing more gashes across his sallow, skinny chest. He’s not much, Warner thought, but he’ll have to do.

  “Where’re your folks?” Warner asked, and Roland shook his head. “Okay, listen to me: We’ve been nuked. The whole fucking country’s been nuked. I don’t know how many are dead in here, but we’re alive, and so is Colonel Macklin. But to stay alive, we’ve got to get things in order as much as we can, and we’ve got to help the colonel. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “I think so,” Roland replied. Nuked, he thought. Nuked ... nuked ... nuked. His senses reeled; in a few minutes, he thought, he’d wake up in bed in Arizona.

  “Okay. Now I want you to stick with me, Roland. We’re going back into the kitchen, and we’re going to find something sharp: a butcher knife, a meat cleaver—whatever. Then we’re going back to the control room.” If I can find my way back, Warner thought—but he didn’t dare say it.

  “My mom and dad,” Roland said weakly. “They’re here ... somewhere.”

  “They’re not going anywhere. Right now Colonel Macklin needs you more than they do. Understand?”

  Roland nodded. King’s Knight! he thought. The King was trapped in a dungeon and needed his help! His parents were gone, swept away in the cataclysm, and the King’s fortress had been nuked. But I’m alive, Roland thought. I’m alive, and I’m a King’s Knight. He squinted into the flashlight beam. “Do I get to be a soldier?” he asked the man.

  “Sure. Now stay close to me. We’re going to find a way into the kitchen.”

  Warner had to move slowly, leaning all his weight on the iron rod. They picked their way into the kitchen, where pockets of fire still burned voraciously. Warner realized that what was afire was the remains of the food pantry; dozens of cans had exploded, and the burned mess clung to the walls. Everything was gone—powdered milk, eggs, bacon and ham, everything. But there was still the emergency food storeroom, Warner knew—and his guts tightened at the thought that they could’ve been trapped down here in the dark without food or water.

  Utensils were scattered everywhere, blown out of the kitchen equipment pantry by the shock. Warner uncovered a meat cleaver with the tip of his makeshift cane. The blade was serrated. “Get that,” he told the boy, and Roland picked it up.

  They left the kitchen and cafeteria, and Warner led Roland to the ruins of the Town Square. Slabs of stone had crashed from above, and the entire area was off-balance and riddled with deep cracks. The video arcade was still burning, the air dense with smoke. “Here,” Warner said, motioning with his light toward the infirmary. They went inside, finding most of the equipment smashed and useless, but Warner kept searching until he discovered a box of tourniquets and a plastic bottle of rubbing alcohol. He told Roland to take one of the tourniquets and the bottle, and then he picked through the shattered drug cabinet. Pills and capsules crunched underfoot like popcorn. Warner’s light fell upon the dead face of one of the nurses, crushed by a piece of rock the size of an anvil. There was no sign of Dr. Lang, Earth House’s resident physician. Warner’s cane uncovered unbroken vials of Demerol and Percodan, and these he asked Roland to pick up for him; Warner stuffed them in his pockets to take back to the colonel.

  “You still with me?” Warner asked.

  “Yes, sir.” I’ll wake up in a few minutes, Roland thought. It’ll be a Saturday morning, and I’ll get out of bed and turn on the computer.

  “We’ve got a long way to go,” Warner told him. “We’ll have to crawl part of the way. But stay with me, understand?”

  Roland followed him out of the infirmary; he wanted to go back to search for his parents but he knew that the King needed him more. He was a King’s Knight, and to be needed like this by the King was a high honor. Again, one part of him recoiled at the horror and destruction that lay around him, and shouted Wake up! Wake up! in the whining voice of an anxious schoolboy; but the other part that was getting stronger looked around at the bodies exposed in the flashlight beam and knew that the weak had to die so the strong might live.

  They moved into the corridors, stepping over bodies and ignoring the cries of the wounded.

  Roland didn’t know how long it took them to reach the wrecked control room. He looked at his wristwatch by the light of a burning heap of rubble, but the crystal had cracked and time had stopped at ten thirty-six. Warner crawled uphill to the edge of the pit and shone his light down. “Colonel!” he called. “I’ve brought help! We’re going to get you out!”

  Ten feet below, Macklin stirred and turned his sweating face toward the light. “Hurry,” he rasped, and then he closed his eyes again.

  Roland crawled to the pit’s rim. He saw two bodies down there, one lying on top of the other, jammed in a space the size of a coffin. The body on the bottom was breathing, and his hand disappeared into a fissure in the wall. Suddenly Roland knew what the meat cleaver was for; he looked at the weapon, could see his face reflected in the blade by the spill of light—except it was a distorted face, and not the one he remembered. His eyes were wild and shiny, and blood had crusted into a star-shaped pattern on his forehead. His entire face was mottled with bruises and swollen like a toadfrog’s, and he looked even worse than the day Mike Armbruster had beaten his ass for not letting him cheat off Roland’s paper during a chemistry test. “Little queer! Little four-eyed queer!” Armbruster had raged, and everyone who ringed them laughed and jeered as Roland tried to escape but was knocked to the dirt again and again. Roland had started to sob, huddled on the ground, and Armbruster had bent down and spat in his face.

  “Do you know how to tie a tourniquet?” the hunchback with the eye patch asked him. Roland shook his head. “I’ll guide you through it when you get down there.” He shone his light around and saw several things that would make a good, hot fire—the pie
ces of a desk, the chairs, the clothes off the corpses. They could get the fire started with the burning rubble they’d passed in the corridor, and Warner still had his lighter in his pocket. “Do you know what’s got to be done?”

  “I ... think so,” Roland replied.

  “Okay, now pay attention to me. I can’t squeeze down into that hole after him. You can. You’re going to draw that tourniquet tight around his arm, and then I’m going to pass down the alcohol. Splash it all over his wrist. He’ll be ready when you are. His wrist is probably smashed, so it won’t be too hard to get the cleaver through the bones. Now listen to me, Roland! I don’t want you hacking down there for a fucking five minutes! Do it hard and quick and get it over with, and once you start don’t you even think about stopping before it’s done. Do you hear me?”

  “Yes sir,” Roland answered, and he thought, Wake up! I’ve got to wake up!

  “If you’ve tied the tourniquet right, you’ll have time to seal the wound before it starts bleeding. You’ll have something to burn the stump with—and you make sure you set fire to it, hear me? If you don’t, he’ll bleed to death. The way he’s jammed in down there, he won’t fight you much, and anyway, he knows what has to be done. Look at me, Roland.”

  Roland looked into the light.

  “If you do what you’re supposed to, Colonel Macklin will live. If you fuck up, he’ll die. Pure and simple. Got it?”

  Roland nodded; his head was dizzy, but his heart was pounding. The King’s trapped, he thought. And of all the King’s Knights, I’m the only one who can set him free! But no, no—this wasn’t a game! This was real life, and his mother and father were lying up there somewhere, and Earth House had been nuked, the whole country had been nuked, everything was destroyed—

  He put a hand to his bloody forehead and squeezed until the bad thoughts were gone. King’s Knight! Sir Roland is my name! And now he was about to go down into the deepest, darkest dungeon to save the King, armed with fire and steel.