Swan Song

by Robert R. McCammon

  “Mister? Are we going to get out of here?”

  Josh hadn’t realized the little girl was nearby. Her voice was still calm, and she was whispering so her mother couldn’t hear. “Sure,” he replied. The child was silent, and again Josh had the feeling that even in the dark she’d seen through his lie. “I don’t know,” he amended. “Maybe. Maybe not. It depends.”

  “Depends on what?”

  Not going to let me off the hook, are you? he thought. “I guess it depends on what’s left outside. Do you understand what’s happened?”

  “Something blew up,” she answered.

  “Right. But a lot of other places might have blown up, too. Whole cities. There might be ...” He hesitated. Go ahead and say it. You might as well get it out. “There might be millions of people dead, or trapped just like we are. So there might not be anybody left to get us out.”

  She paused for a moment. Then she replied, “That’s not what I asked. I asked: Are we going to get out of here?”

  Josh realized she was asking if they were going to try to get themselves out, instead of waiting for someone else to come help them. “Well,” he said, “if we had a bulldozer handy, I’d say yes. Otherwise, I don’t think we’re going anywhere anytime soon.”

  “My mama’s real sick,” Swan said, and this time her voice cracked. “I’m afraid.”

  “So am I,” Josh admitted. The little girl sobbed just once, and then she stopped as if she’d pulled herself together with tremendous willpower. Josh reached out and found her arm. Blisters broke on her skin. Josh flinched and withdrew his hand. “How about you?” he asked her. “Are you hurting?”

  “My skin hurts. It feels like needles and pins. And my stomach’s sick. I had to throw up a while ago, but I did it in the corner.”

  “Yeah, I feel kind of sick myself.” He felt a pressing need to urinate as well, and he was going to have to figure out a makeshift sanitation system. They had plenty of canned food and fruit juices, and no telling what else was buried around them in the dirt. Stop it! he thought, because he’d allowed himself a flicker of hope. The air’s going to be gone soon! There’s no way we can survive down here!

  But he knew also that they were in the only place that could have sheltered them from the blast. With all that dirt above them, the radiation might not get through. Josh was tired and his bones ached, but he no longer felt the urge to lie down and die; if he did, he thought, the little girl’s fate would be sealed, too. But if he fought off the weariness and got to work organizing the cans of food, he might be able to keep them all alive for ... how long? he wondered. One more day? Three more? A week?

  “How old are you?” he asked.

  “I’m nine,” she answered.

  “Nine,” he repeated softly, and he shook his head. Rage and pity warred in his soul. A nine-year-old child ought to be playing in the summer sun. A nine-year-old child shouldn’t be down in a dark basement with one foot in the grave. It wasn’t fair! Damn it to Hell, it wasn’t right!

  “What’s your name?”

  It was a minute before he could find his voice. “Josh. And yours is Swan?”

  “Sue Wanda. But my mama calls me Swan. How’d you get to be a giant?”

  There were tears in his eyes, but he smiled anyway. “I guess I ate my mama’s cornbread when I was about your age.”

  “Cornbread made you a giant?”

  “Well, I was always big. I used to play some football—first at Auburn University, then for the New Orleans Saints.”

  “Do you still?”

  “Nope. I’m a ... I was a wrestler,” he said. “Professional wrestling. I was the bad guy.”

  “Oh.” Swan thought about that. She recalled that one of her many uncles, Uncle Chuck, used to like to go to the wrestling matches in Wichita and watched them on TV too. “Did you like that? Being the bad guy, I mean?”

  “It’s kind of a game, really. I just acted bad. And I don’t know if I liked it or not. It was just something I started do—”

  “Gopher’s in the hole!” PawPaw said. “Lordy, lookit him go!”

  “Why does he keep talking about a gopher?” Swan asked.

  “He’s hurt. He doesn’t know what he’s saying.” PawPaw rambled on about finding his bedroom slippers and something about the crops needing rain, then he lapsed again into silence. Heat radiated off the old man’s body as if from an open oven, and Josh knew he couldn’t last much longer. God only knew what looking into that blast had done inside his skull.

  “Mama said we were going to Blakeman,” Swan said, pulling her attention away from the old man. She knew he was dying. “She said we were going home. Where were you going?”

  “Garden City. I was supposed to wrestle there.”

  “Is that your home?”

  “No. My home’s down in Alabama—a long, long way from here.”

  “Mama said we were going to go see my granddaddy. He lives in Blakeman. Does your family live in Alabama?”

  He thought of Rose and his two sons. But they were part of someone else’s life now—if indeed they were still alive. “I don’t have any family,” Josh replied.

  “Don’t you have anybody who loves you?” Swan asked.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t think so.” He heard Darleen moan, and he said, “You’d better see to your mother, huh?”

  “Yes, sir.” Swan started to crawl away, but then she looked back into the darkness where the black giant was. “I knew something terrible was going to happen,” she said. “I knew it the night we left Uncle Tommy’s trailer. I tried to tell my mama, but she didn’t understand.”

  “How did you know?”

  “The fireflies told me,” she said. “I saw it in their lights.”

  “Sue Wanda?” Darleen called weakly. “Swan? Where are you?”

  Swan said, “Here, Mama,” and she crawled back to her mother’s side.

  The fireflies told her, Josh thought. Right. At least the little girl had a strong imagination. That was good; sometimes the imagination could be a useful place to hide in when the going got rough.

  But he suddenly remembered the cloud of locusts that had flown through his car. “Been flyin’ out of the fields by the thousands for the last two, three days,” PawPaw had told him. “Kinda peculiar.”

  Had the locusts known something was about to happen in those cornfields? Josh wondered. Had they been able to sense disaster—maybe smell it on the wind, or in the earth itself?

  He turned his mind to more important matters. First he had to find a corner to pee into before his bladder burst. He’d never had to crouch and pee at the same time before. But if the air was all right and they lasted for a while, something was going to have to be done with their waste. He didn’t like the idea of crawling through his own, much less anyone else’s. The floor was of concrete, but it had cracked wide open during the tremors; he recalled he’d felt a garden hoe in the debris that might be useful in digging a latrine.

  And he was going to search the basement from one end to the other on his hands and knees, gathering up all the cans and everything else he could find. They obviously had plenty of food, and the cans would contain enough water and juices to keep them for a while. It was light he wanted more than anything else, and he’d never known how much he could miss electricity.

  He crawled into a far corner to relieve himself. Going to be a long time before your next bath, he thought. Won’t be needing sunglasses anytime soon, either.

  He winced. The urine burned like battery acid spewing out of him.

  But I’m alive! he reassured himself. There might not be a whole hell of a lot to live for, but I’m alive. Tomorrow I may be dead, but today I’m alive and pissing on my knees.

  And for the first time since the blast he allowed himself to dream that somehow—some way—he might live to see the outside world again.

  18

  THE DARK CAME WITH no warning. December’s chill was in the July air, and a black, icy rain continued to fall on the ruins o
f Manhattan.

  Sister Creep and Artie Wisco stood together atop a ridge of wreckage and looked west. Fires were still burning across the Hudson River, in the oil refineries of Hoboken and Jersey City—but other than the orange flames, the west was without light. Raindrops pattered on the warped, gaily colored umbrella that Artie had found in what remained of a sporting goods store. The store had also yielded up other treasures—a Day-Glo orange nylon knapsack strapped to Artie’s back, and a new pair of sneakers on Sister Creep’s feet. In the Gucci bag around her shoulder was a charred loaf of rye bread, two cans of anchovies with the handy keys that rolled the lids back, a package of ham slices that had cooked in the plastic, and a miraculously unbroken bottle of Canada Dry ginger ale that had survived the destruction of a deli. It had taken them several hours to cover the terrain between upper Fifth Avenue and their first destination, the Lincoln Tunnel. But the tunnel itself had collapsed, and the river had flooded right up to the toll gates along with a wave of crushed cars, concrete slabs and corpses.

  They had turned away in silence. Sister Creep had led Artie southward, toward the Holland Tunnel and another route under the river. Darkness had fallen before they’d made it, and now they’d have to wait until morning to find out if the Holland had collapsed as well. The last street sign that Sister Creep had found said West 22nd, but it was lying on its side in the ashes and could’ve blown far from where that street had actually been.

  “Well,” Artie said quietly, staring across the river, “don’t look like anybody’s home, does it?”

  “No.” Sister Creep shivered and drew the mink coat tighter around her. “It’s gotten colder. We’re going to have to find some shelter.” She looked through the darkness at the vague shapes of the few structures that hadn’t been toppled. Any one of them might fall on their heads, but Sister Creep didn’t like the way the temperature was dropping. “Come on,” she said, and she started walking toward one of the buildings. Artie followed her without question.

  During their journey they had found only four other people who hadn’t been killed in the detonation, and three of those had been so mangled they were very near death. The fourth was a terribly burned man in a pin-striped business suit who had howled like a dog when they’d approached and had scuttled back into a crevice to hide. So Sister Creep and Artie had gone on, walking over so many bodies that the horror of death lost its impact; now they were shocked whenever they heard a groan in the rubble or, as had happened once, someone laughing and shrieking off in the distance. They had gone in the direction of the voice, but they’d seen no one living. The mad laughter haunted Sister Creep; it reminded her of the laughter she’d heard inside that theater, from the man with the burning hand.

  “There are others still alive out there,” he’d said. “Waiting to die. It won’t be long. Not long for you, either.”

  “We’ll see about that, fucker,” Sister Creep said.

  “What?” Artie asked.

  “Oh. Nothing. I was just ... thinking.” Thinking, she realized. Thinking was not something she did much of. The last several years were blurred, and beyond those was a darkness broken only by the flashing blue light and the demon in the yellow raincoat. My real name’s not Sister Creep! she thought suddenly. My real name is ... but she didn’t know what it was, and she didn’t know who she was or where she’d come from. How did I get here? she asked herself, but she could provide no answer.

  They entered the remains of a gray stone building by climbing up a rubble heap and crawling through a hole in the wall. The interior was pitch dark and the air was dank and smoky, but at least they were within a windbreak. They groped their way along a tilting floor until they found a corner. When they’d gotten settled, Sister Creep reached into her bag to bring out the loaf of bread and the bottle of ginger ale. Her fingers grazed the circle of glass, which she’d wrapped up in a scorched striped shirt she’d taken off a mannequin. The other pieces of glass, wrapped in the blue scarf, were down at the bottom of the bag.

  “Here.” She tore off a piece of the bread and gave it to Artie, then tore a piece for herself. There was only a burned taste, but it was better than nothing. She unscrewed the cap off the bottle of ginger ale, and the soda instantly foamed up and spewed everywhere. She quickly put it to her mouth, drank several swallows and passed the bottle to Artie.

  “I hate ginger ale,” Artie said after he’d finished drinking, “but this is the best damned stuff I ever drank in my life.”

  “Don’t drink it all.” She decided against opening the anchovies, because their saltiness would only make them more thirsty. The slices of ham were too precious to eat yet. She gave him another small bit of bread, took another for herself and put the loaf away.

  “Know what I had for dinner the night before it happened?” Artie asked her. “A steak. A big T-bone steak at a place on East Fiftieth. Then some of the guys and me started hittin’ the bars. That was a night, I’ll tell you! We had a helluva time!”

  “Good for you.”

  “Yeah. What were you doin’ that night?”

  “Nothing special,” she said. “I was just around.”

  Artie was quiet for a while, chewing on his bread. Then he said, “I called my wife before I left the hotel. I guess I told her a whopper, ’cause I said I was just gonna go out and have a nice dinner and come back to bed. She said for me to be careful, and she said she loved me. I told her I loved her, and that I’d see her in a couple of days.” He was silent, and when he sighed Sister Creep heard his breath hitch. “Jesus,” he whispered. “I’m glad I called her. I’m glad I got to hear her voice before it happened. Hey, lady—what if Detroit got hit, too?”

  “Got hit? What do you mean, got hit?”

  “A nuclear bomb,” he said. “What else do you think could’ve done this? A nuclear bomb! Maybe more than one. The things probably fell all over the country! Probably hit all the cities, and Detroit, too!” His voice was getting hysterical, and he forced himself to wait until he was under control again. “Damned Russians bombed us, lady. Don’t you read the papers?”

  “No. I don’t.”

  “What’ve you been doin’? Livin’ on Mars? Anybody who reads the papers and watches the tube could’ve seen this shit comin’! The Russians bombed the hell out of us ... and I guess we bombed the hell out of them, too.”

  A nuclear bomb? she thought. She hardly remembered what that was; nuclear war was something she’d worried about in another life.

  “I hope—if they got Detroit—that she went fast. I mean, that’s okay to hope for, isn’t it? That she went fast, without pain?”

  “Yes. I think that’s all right.”

  “Is it ... is it okay that I told her a lie? It was a white lie. I didn’t want her to be worried about me. She worries that I’m gonna drink too much and make a fool of myself. I can’t hold my liquor too good. Is it okay that I told her a white lie that night?”

  She knew he was begging her to say it was all right. “Sure,” she told him. “A lot of people did worse things that night. She went to sleep without worrying, didn’t—”

  Something sharp pricked Sister Creep’s left cheek. “Don’t move,” a woman’s voice warned. “Don’t even breathe.” The voice shook; whoever was speaking was scared to death.

  “Who’s there?” Artie asked, startled almost out of his skin. “Hey, lady! You okay?”

  “I’m okay,” Sister Creep answered. She reached up to her cheek and felt a jagged, knifelike piece of glass.

  “I said don’t move!” The glass jabbed her. “How many are with you?”

  “Just one more.”

  “Artie Wisco. My name’s Artie Wisco. Where are you?”

  There was a long pause. Then the woman said, “You’ve got food?”

  “Yes.”

  “Water.” It was a man’s voice this time, further to the left. “Have you got water?”

  “Not water. Ginger ale.”

  “Let’s see what they look like, Beth,” the man said.
<
br />   A lighter’s flame popped up, so bright in the darkness that Sister Creep had to close her eyes against the glare for a few seconds. The woman held the flame closer to Sister Creep’s face, then toward Artie. “I think they’re all right,” she told the man, who moved into the range of the light.

  Sister Creep could make out the woman crouched next to her. Her face was swollen and there was a gash across the bridge of her nose, but she appeared to be young, maybe in her mid-twenties, with a few remaining ringlets of curly light brown hair dangling from her blistered scalp. Her eyebrows had been burned off, and her dark blue eyes were puffy and bloodshot; she was a slim woman, and she wore a blue striped dress that was splotched with blood. Her long, frail arms seethed with blisters. Draped around her shoulders was what looked like part of a gold-colored curtain.

  The man wore the rags of a cop’s uniform. He was older, possibly in his late thirties, and most of his dark, crewcut hair remained on the right side of his head; on the left, it had been burned away to raw scalp. He was a big, heavyset man, and his left arm was wrapped up and supported in a sling made of that same coarse gold material.

  “My God,” Artie said. “Lady, we found a cop!”

  “Where’d you two come from?” Beth asked her.

  “Out there. Where else?”

  “What’s in the bag?” The woman nodded toward it.

  “Are you asking me or mugging me?”

  She hesitated, glanced at the policeman and then back at Sister Creep, and lowered the piece of glass. She stuck it through a sash tied around her waist. “I’m asking you.”

  “Burned bread, a couple of cans of anchovies, and some ham slices.” Sister Creep could almost see the young woman start salivating. She reached in and brought out the bread. “Here. Eat it in good health.”

  Beth tore off a chunk and handed the dwindling loaf to the policeman, who also gouged off some and stuffed it into his mouth as if it were God’s manna. “Please,” Beth said, and she reached for the ginger ale. Sister Creep obliged her, and by the time she and the policeman had both had a taste there were maybe three good swallows left. “All the water’s contaminated,” Beth told her. “One of us drank some from a puddle yesterday. He started throwing up blood last night. It took him almost six hours to die. I’ve got a watch that still works. See?” She proudly showed Sister Creep her Timex; the crystal was gone, but that old watch was still ticking. The time was twenty-two minutes past eight.