“One of us,” she’d said. “How many more people are here?” Sister Creep asked.
“Two more. Well, really one. The Spanish woman. We lost Mr. Kaplan last night—he drank the water. The boy died yesterday, too. And Mrs. Ivers died in her sleep. There are four of us left.”
“Three,” the policeman said.
“Yeah. Right. Three of us left. The Spanish woman’s down in the basement. We can’t get her to move, and neither of us understand Spanish. Do you?”
“No. Sorry.”
“I’m Beth Phelps, and he’s Jack ...” She couldn’t remember his last name and shook her head.
“Jack Tomachek,” he supplied.
Artie reintroduced himself, but Sister Creep said, “Why aren’t you people up here instead of in the basement?”
“It’s warmer down there,” Jack told her. “And safer, too.”
“Safer? How’s that? If this old building shifts again, it’ll come down on your heads.”
“We were up here yesterday,” Beth explained. “The boy—he was about fifteen, I guess—was the strongest of us. He was Ethiopian or something, and he could only speak a little English. He went out to find food, and he brought back some cans of corned beef hash, cat food, and a bottle of wine. But ... they followed him back here. They found us.”
“They?” Artie asked. “They who?”
“Three of them. Burned so bad you couldn’t tell if they were men or women. They followed him back here, and they were carrying hammers and broken bottles. One of them had an axe. They wanted our food. The boy fought them, and the one with the axe ...” She trailed off, her eyes glassy and staring at the orange flame of the lighter in her hand. “They were crazy,” she said. “They ... they weren’t human. One of them cut me across the face. I guess I was lucky. We ran from them and they took our food. I don’t know where they went. But I remember ... they smelled like ... like burned cheeseburgers. Isn’t that funny? That’s what I thought of—burned cheeseburgers. So we went down into the basement to hide. There’s no telling what other kinds of ... of things are out there.”
You don’t know the half of it, Sister Creep thought.
“I tried to fight them off,” Jack said. “But I guess I’m not in fighting shape anymore.” He turned around, and both Sister Creep and Artie flinched. Jack Tomachek’s back from shoulders to waist was a scarlet, suppurating mass of burned tissue. He turned to face them again. “Worst fucking sunburn this old Polack ever got.” He smiled bitterly.
“We heard you up here,” Beth told them. “At first we thought those things had come back. We came up to listen, and we heard you eating. Listen ... the Spanish woman hasn’t eaten, either. Can I take her some bread?”
“Take us to the basement.” Sister Creep got to her feet. “I’ll open up the ham.”
Beth and Jack led them into a hallway. Water was streaming down from above, forming a large black pool on the floor. Through the hallway, a flight of wooden stairs without a bannister descended into the darkness. The staircase shook precariously under their feet.
It did seem warmer, if only by five or six degrees, in the basement, though exhaled breath was still visible. The stone walls were still holding together, and the ceiling was mostly intact but for a few holes that let rainwater seep through. This was an old building, Sister Creep thought, and they didn’t put them up like this anymore. Stone pillars set at intervals supported the ceiling; some of those were riddled with cracks, but none of them had collapsed. Yet, Sister Creep told herself.
“There she is.” Beth walked toward a figure huddled at the base of one of the pillars. Black water was streaming down right over the figure’s head; she was sitting in a spreading pool of contaminated rain, and she was holding something in her arms. Beth’s lighter went out. “Sorry,” she said. “It gets too hot to hold, and I don’t want to use up all the fluid. It was Mr. Kaplan’s.”
“What did you do with the bodies?”
“We took them away. This place is full of corridors. We took them way down to the end of one and left them. I ... I wanted to say a prayer over them, but...”
“But what?”
“I forgot how to pray,” she replied. “Praying ... just didn’t seem to make much sense anymore.”
Sister Creep grunted and reached into her bag for the package of ham slices. Beth bent down and offered the bottle of ginger ale to the Spanish woman. Rainwater splattered her hand. “Here,” she said. “It’s something to drink. El drink-o.”
The Spanish woman made a whimpering, crooning sound but didn’t respond.
“She won’t move away from there,” Beth said. “The water’s getting all over her, and she won’t move six feet to a dry place. Do you want food?” she asked the Spanish woman. “Eat eat? Christ, how can you live in New York City without knowing English?”
Sister Creep got most of the plastic peeled away from the ham. She tore off a piece and bent on her knees beside Beth Phelps. “Use your lighter again. Maybe if she sees what we’ve got, we can pull her away from there.”
The lighter flared. Sister Creep looked into the blistered but still pretty face of a Hispanic girl who was maybe all of twenty. Her long black hair was crisped on the ends, and there were raw holes here and there on her scalp where circles of hair had been burned away. The woman paid no attention to the light. Her large, liquid brown eyes were fixed on what she cuddled in her arms.
“Oh,” Sister Creep said softly. “Oh ... no.”
The child was maybe three years old—a girl, with glossy black hair like her mother’s. Sister Creep couldn’t see the child’s face. She didn’t want to. But one small hand was rigidly curled as if reaching up for her mother, and the stiffness of the corpse in the woman’s arms told Sister Creep that the child had been dead for some time.
The water was leaking down through a hole in the ceiling, running through the Spanish woman’s hair and over her face like black tears. She began to croon gently, lovingly rocking the corpse.
“She’s out of her mind,” Beth said. “She’s been like that since the child died last night. If she doesn’t get out of that water, she’s going to die, too.”
Sister Creep heard Beth only vaguely, as if from a vast distance. She held out her arms toward the Spanish woman. “Here,” she said, in what sounded like a stranger’s voice. “I’ll take her. Give her to me.” Rainwater ran down her hands and arms in streaks of ebony.
The Spanish woman’s crooning got louder.
“Give her to me. I’ll take her.”
The Spanish woman began to rock the corpse more furiously.
“Give her to me.” Sister Creep heard her own voice echo crazily, and suddenly there was a flashing blue light in her eyes. “I’ll ... take ... her....”
The rain was falling, and thunder rumbled like the voice of God, You! You sinner! You drunken sinner, you’ve killed her, and now you have to pay
She looked down. In her arms was the corpse of a little girl. There was blood in the child’s blond hair, and the little girl’s eyes were open and full of rain. The blue light of the state trooper car was spinning, and the trooper in the yellow raincoat who was crouched on the road in front of her said gently, “Come on. You have to give her to me now.” He looked back over his shoulder, at the other trooper who was setting out flares near the wreckage of an overturned car. “She’s out of her mind. I can smell alcohol, too. You’re going to have to help me.”
And then they were both reaching toward her, both of the demons in yellow raincoats, trying to take her baby. She recoiled and fought them, screaming, “No! You can’t have her! I won’t let you have her!” But the thunder commanded, Give her up, you sinner, give her up, and when she cried out and put her hands over her ears to block off the voice of judgment they took her baby away from her.
And from the little girl’s hand fell a globe of glass, the kind of trinket that holds a little snow scene within it, a make-believe village in a fairy-tale land.
“Mommy,” she remember
ed the child saying excitedly, “look what I won at the party! I pinned the tail on the donkey the best!”
The child had shaken the globe, and for a moment—just a moment—her mother had looked away from the road to focus her blurred vision on the scene of snow falling amid the roofs of a distant and perfect land.
She watched the glass globe fall, in terrible slow motion, and she screamed because she knew it was about to break on the concrete, and when it broke everything would be gone and destroyed.
It hit in front of her, and as it shattered into a thousand pieces of glittering junk her scream stopped with a strangled moan.
“Oh,” she whispered. “Oh ... no.”
Sister Creep stared at the dead child in the Spanish woman’s arms. My little girl is dead, she remembered. I was drunk, and I picked her up at a birthday party, and I drove right off the road into a ditch. Oh, God ... oh, dear Jesus. A sinner. A drunken, wicked sinner. I killed her. I killed my little girl. Oh, God ... oh, God, forgive me....
Tears scorched her eyes and ran down her cheeks. In her mind whirled fragments of memory like dead leaves in a high wind: her husband wild with rage, cursing her and saying he never wanted to see her again; her own mother, looking at her with disgust and pity and telling her she was never meant to bear a child; the doctor at the sanitarium, nodding his head and checking his watch; the halls of the hospital, where grotesque, shambling, insane women chattered and shrieked and fought one another over combs; and the high fence that she had climbed over, in the dead of night and in swirling snow, to reach the woods beyond.
My little girl is dead, she thought. Dead and gone, a long time ago.
The tears almost blinded her, but she saw well enough to know that her little girl had not suffered as this one in the Spanish woman’s arms had. Her little girl had been laid to rest under a shade tree atop a hill; this one would lie forever in a cold, damp basement in a city of the dead.
The Spanish woman lifted her head and looked at Sister Creep through haunted eyes. She blinked and slowly reached through the rain to touch Sister Creep’s cheek; a tear balanced on the tip of her finger for a second before it dropped.
“Give her to me,” Sister Creep whispered. “I’ll take her.”
The Spanish woman looked again, longingly, at the corpse, and then the tears ran from her eyes and mingled with the black rain on her face; she kissed the dead child’s forehead, cradled it against her for a moment—and then she held the corpse toward Sister Creep.
She took the body as if she was accepting a gift and started to stand up.
But the Spanish woman reached out again and touched the crucifix-shaped wound at Sister Creep’s neck. She said wonderingly, “Bendito. Muy bendito.”
Sister Creep stood up, and the Spanish woman slowly crawled out of the water and lay on the floor, huddled and shivering.
Jack Tomachek took the corpse from Sister Creep and went off into the darkness.
Beth said, “I don’t know how, but you did it.” She bent down to offer the Spanish woman the bottle of ginger ale; the woman took it from Beth and finished it.
“My God,” Artie Wisco said, standing behind her. “I just realized ... I don’t even know your name.”
“It’s ...” What? she wondered. What’s my name? Where do I come from? Where is that shade tree that shelters my little girl? None of the answers would come to her. “You can call me ...” She hesitated. I’m a bag lady, she thought. I’m nothing but a bag lady with no name, and I don’t know where I’m going—but at least I know how I got here.
“Sister,” she replied. “You can call me ... Sister.”
And it came to her like a shout: I’m not crazy anymore.
“Sister,” Artie repeated. He pronounced it “Sista.” “That ain’t much of a name, but I guess it’ll do. Glad to know you, Sister.”
She nodded, the shadowy memories still whirling. The pain of what she’d remembered was still with her and would remain, but that had happened a long time ago, to a weaker and more helpless woman.
“What are we going to do?” Beth asked her. “We can’t just stay here, can we?”
“No. We can’t. Tomorrow Artie and I are going through the Holland Tunnel, if it hasn’t caved in. We’re walking west. If you three want to go with us, you’re welcome.”
“Leave New York? What if ... what if there’s nothing out there? What if everything’s gone?”
“It won’t be easy,” Sister said firmly. “It’ll be damned hard and damned dangerous. I don’t know what the weather’s going to do, but we start with one step, and that’s the only way I know to get anywhere. Right?”
“Right,” Artie echoed. “You’ve got good shoes, Beth. Those shoes’ll take you a long way.”
We’ve got a long way to go, Sister considered. A very long way—and God only knows what we’ll find out there. Or what will find us.
“Okay,” Beth decided. “Okay. I’m with you.” She put the flame of her lighter out again to save fuel.
But this time it didn’t seem nearly as dark.
FOUR
Land of the Dead
The biggest tomb in the world
Belly of the beast
The most wonderful light
Summer’s over
Tunnel trolls
Protect the child
Dreamwalking
New turn of the game
19
THE MAN WITH BLOODY strips of shirt bandaged around the stump of his right wrist moved cautiously along the wrecked corridor. He didn’t want to fall down and start that stump bleeding again; it had been dribbling for hours before it had finally crusted over. He was weak and lightheaded, but he pushed himself onward because he had to see for himself. His heart was pounding, and the blood sang in his ears. But what his senses fixed on was an acute itching between the first and second fingers of the right hand that wasn’t there anymore. The itching of that phantom hand was about to drive him crazy.
Beside him was the one-eyed hunchback, and in front of him, carrying the flashlight and negotiating a path, was the boy with the cracked eyeglasses. In his left hand the boy gripped a meat cleaver, its blade rimmed with Colonel Jimbo Macklin’s dried blood.
Roland Croninger stopped, the beam of his light spearing through the haze before him.
“There it is,” Teddybear said. “There it is. See? I told you, didn’t I? I told you.”
Macklin moved forward a few paces and took the flashlight from Roland. He played it over the wall of boulders and slabs that completely blocked the corridor in front of them, looking for a chink, a weak place, an area to apply leverage, anything. There wasn’t a space large enough for a rat to squeeze through. “God help us,” Macklin said quietly.
“I told you! See? Didn’t I tell you?” Teddybear Warner babbled. Finding this blockage had snapped the last of the willpower that was holding him together.
Beyond that wall of rock lay Earth House’s emergency food supply and equipment room. They were cut off from everything—the spare flashlights and batteries, toilet paper, flares, everything.
“We’re fucked,” Teddybear giggled. “Oh, are we fucked!”
Dust filtered down through the flashlight beam. Macklin raised it and saw the jagged fissures that cleaved the corridor’s ceiling. More of the corridor might cave in at any time. Cables and wires dangled, and the iron reinforcement beams that were supposed to have supported Earth House through a nuclear attack were entirely cut through. Teddybear’s giggling was mixed with sobs, and as Macklin realized the full extent of the disaster he could no longer stand the sound of human weakness; he ground his teeth, his face contorting in rage, and he turned to strike Teddybear across the face with his itching right hand.
But he had no right hand, and as he reared his arm back there was a searing, ripping pain, and fresh blood dripped through the bandages.
Macklin cradled his injured arm against his body and squeezed his eyes tightly shut. He felt sick, about to throw up or pass out.
Discipline and control, he thought. Shape up, soldier! Shape up, damn you!
When I open my eyes again, he told himself, that wall of rock won’t be there. We’ll be able to walk right on through the corridor to where the food is. We’ll be okay. Please, God ... please make everything okay.
He opened his eyes.
The wall of rock remained. “Anybody got any plastic explosive?” Macklin asked; his voice echoed in the corridor. It was a lunatic voice, the voice of a man down in the bottom of a muddy pit with bodies sprawled all around him.
“We’re going to die,” Teddybear said, giggling and sobbing, his one good eye wild. “We’ve got the biggest tomb in the world!”
“Colonel?”
It was the boy speaking. Macklin shone the light in Roland’s face. It was a dusty, blood-splattered, emotionless mask.
“We’ve got hands,” Roland said.
“Hands. Sure. I’ve got one hand. You’ve got two. Teddybear’s two aren’t worth shit. Sure, we’ve got hands.”
“Not our hands,” Roland replied calmly. An idea had come to him, clear and precise. “Their hands. The ones who are still alive up there.”
“The civilians?” Macklin shook his head. “We probably couldn’t find ten men able to work! And look at that ceiling. See those cracks? The rest of it’s about to fall. Who’s going to work with that hanging over their heads?”
“How far is it from that wall to the food?”
“I don’t know. Maybe twenty feet. Maybe thirty.”
Roland nodded. “What if we tell them it’s ten feet? And what if they don’t know about the ceiling? Do you think they’d work, or not?”
Macklin hesitated. This is a kid, he thought. What does this kid know about anything?
Swan Song Page 18
