Swan Song

by Robert R. McCammon

  And when Macklin had decided what it was he had to do, the Shadow Soldier had told him how to do it.

  Ragsdale had been the weakest. It had been a simple thing to press his face into the mud while the others were sleeping.

  But one third of the rice wasn’t enough, the Shadow Soldier said. Macklin had strangled McGee, and then there were two.

  Mississippi had been the toughest to kill. He was still strong, and he’d fought Macklin off again and again. But Macklin had kept at him, attacking him when he tried to sleep, and finally Mississippi had lost his mind and crouched in the corner, calling for Jesus like a hysterical child. It had been an easy thing, then, to grasp Mississippi’s chin and wrench his head violently backward.

  Then all the rice was his, and the Shadow Soldier said he’d done very, very well.

  “Can you hear me, Colonel, sir?” Schorr sneered beyond the barricade. “Just give us the food and we’ll go!”

  “Bullshit,” Macklin answered. There was no more use in hiding. “We’ve got weapons in here, Schorr.” He desperately wanted the man to believe they had more than just one Ingram gun, a couple of metal clubs, a metal cleaver and some sharp rocks. “Back off!”

  “We’ve brought along some toys of our own. I don’t think you want to find out what they are.”

  “You’re bluffing.”

  “Am I? Well, sir, let me tell you this: I found a way to get to the garage. There’s not much left. Most everything’s smashed to hell, and you can’t get to the drawbridge crank. But I found what I needed, Colonel, sir, and I don’t give a damn how many guns you’ve got in there. Now: Does the food come out, or do we take it?”

  “Roland,” Macklin said urgently, “get ready to fire.”

  The boy aimed the Ingram gun in the direction of Schorr’s voice.

  “What we’ve got stays here,” Macklin told him. “You find your own food, just like we found ours.”

  “There is no more!” Schorr raged. “You sonofabitch, you’re not going to kill us like you killed everybody else in this damn—”

  “Fire,” Macklin ordered.

  Roland squeezed the trigger with no hesitation.

  The gun jumped in his hands as the tracers streaked across the gym like scarlet comets. They hit the barricade and the wall around the door, popping and whining madly as they ricocheted. In the brief, jerky light, a man—not Schorr—could be seen trying to climb through the space between the pile of rubble and the top of the door. He started to pull back when the firing began, but he suddenly screamed, caught in the glass and metal cables that Roland had arranged. Bullets hit him and he writhed, getting more tangled up. His screaming stopped. Arms came up, grabbed the body and heaved it backward into the corridor.

  Roland released the trigger. His pockets were full of ammo clips, and the colonel had drilled him in changing the clips quickly. The noise of the machine gun faded. The marauders were silent.

  “They’re gone!” Warner shouted. “We ran ’em off!”

  “Shut up!” Macklin warned him. He saw a flicker of light from the corridor—what might’ve been a match being struck. In the next instant, something afire came flying over the barricade. It hit with the sound of shattering glass, and Macklin had a second to smell gasoline before the Molotov cocktail blew, a sheet of fire leaping across the gym. He jerked his head down behind his rock pile hiding place as glass whined like yellowjackets around his ears. The flames shot past him, and when the explosion was over he looked up and saw a puddle of gas burning about fifteen feet away.

  Roland had ducked as well, but small fragments of glass had nicked his cheek and shoulder. He lifted his head and fired again at the doorway; the bullets hit the top of the barricade and ricocheted harmlessly.

  “You like that, Macklin?” Schorr taunted. “We found us a little gasoline in some of the car tanks. Found us some rags and a few beer bottles, too. We’ve got more where that one came from. You like it?”

  Firelight flickered off the walls of the wrecked gym. Macklin hadn’t counted on this; Schorr and the others could stand behind the barricade and toss those bastards over the top. He heard a metal tool of some kind scrape against the debris that blocked the door, and some of the rocks slid away.

  A second gasoline-filled bottle, a flaming rag jammed down into it, sailed into the gym and exploded near Captain Warner, who cowered behind a mound of stones, bent metal and Nautilus weights. The gas spattered like grease from a skillet, and the captain cried out as he was hit by flying glass. Roland fired the Ingram gun at the doorway as a third bomb landed between him and Colonel Macklin, and he had to leap aside as burning gas splashed at his legs. Shards of glass tugged at Macklin’s jacket, and one caught him over the right eyebrow and snapped his head back like a punch.

  The gym’s rubble—mats, towels, ceiling tiles, ripped-up carpeting and wood paneling—was catching fire. Smoke and gasoline fumes swirled through the air.

  When Roland looked up again, he could see blurred figures furiously digging their way over the barricade. He gave them another burst of bullets, and they scattered back into the corridor like roaches down a hole. A gas-filled Dr Pepper bottle exploded in reply, the whoosh of flames searing Roland’s face and sucking the breath from his lungs. He felt a stinging pain and looked at his left hand; it was covered in flame, and silver-dollar-sized circles of fire burned all over his arm. He shouted with terror and scrambled toward the mop bucket full of toilet water.

  The flames were growing, merging and advancing across the gym. More of the barricade crumbled, and Macklin saw the marauders coming in; Schorr was leading them, armed with a broom handle sharpened into a spear, a bloodstained rag wrapped around his swollen, wild-eyed face. Behind him were three men and a woman, all carrying primitive weapons: jagged-edged stones and clubs made from broken furniture. As Roland frantically washed off the burning gasoline Teddybear Warner hobbled out from his shelter and fell down on his knees in front of Schorr, his hands upraised for mercy. “Don’t kill me!” he begged. “I’m with you! I swear to God, I’m with—”

  Schorr drove the sharpened broomstick into Warner’s throat. The others swarmed over him as well, beating and kicking the captain as he flopped on the end of the spear. The flames threw their shadows on the walls like dancers in Hell. Then Schorr jerked the spear from Warner’s throat and whirled toward Colonel Macklin.

  Roland picked up the Ingram gun at his side. A hand suddenly clamped around the back of his neck, jerking him to his feet. He saw the blurred image of a man in tattered clothes standing over him, about to smash a rock into his skull.

  Schorr charged Macklin. The colonel staggered to his feet to defend himself with the high-tech mace.

  The man gripping Roland’s neck made a choking sound. He was wearing eyeglasses with cracked lenses held together at the bridge of his nose with a Band-Aid.

  Schorr feinted with the spear. Macklin lost his balance and fell, twisting away as the spear grazed his side. “Roland, help me!” he screamed.

  “Oh ... my God,” the man with the cracked eyeglasses breathed. “Roland ... you’re alive....”

  Roland thought the man’s voice was familiar, but he wasn’t sure. Nothing was certain anymore but the fact that he was a King’s Knight. All that had gone before this moment were shadows, flimsy and insubstantial, and this was real life.

  “Roland!” the man said. “Don’t you know your own—”

  Roland brought the Ingram gun up and blew most of the man’s head away. The stranger staggered back, broken teeth chattering in a mask of blood, and fell into the fire.

  The other people threw themselves upon the garbage bag and tore wildly at it, splitting it open and fighting one another for the scraps. Roland turned toward Schorr and Colonel Macklin; Schorr was jabbing at the colonel with his spear while Macklin used his metal club to parry the thrusts. Macklin was being steadily forced into a corner, where the leaping firelight revealed a large airshaft set in the cracked wall, its wire mesh grille hanging by one scr
ew.

  Roland started to shoot, but smoke swirled around the figures and he feared hitting the King. His finger twitched on the trigger—and then something struck him in the small of the back and knocked him onto his face on the floor, where he lay struggling for breath. The machine gun fell from his hand, and the woman with insane, red-rimmed eyes who’d thrown the rock scrabbled on her hands and knees to get it.

  Macklin swung the mace at Schorr’s head. Schorr ducked, stumbling over the rocks and burning debris. “Come on!” Macklin yelled. “Come and get me!”

  The crazy woman crawled over Roland and picked up the Ingram gun. Roland was stunned, but he knew both he and the King were dead if she was able to use the weapon; he grabbed her wrist, and she shrieked and fought, her teeth gnashing at his face. She got her other hand up and went for his eyes with her fingers, but he twisted his head away to keep from being blinded. The woman wrenched her wrist loose and, still shrieking, aimed the machine gun.

  She fired it, the tracers streaking across the gym.

  But she was not aiming at Colonel Macklin. The two men who were fighting over the garbage can were caught by the bullets and made to dance as if their shoes were aflame. They went down, and the crazy woman scrambled toward the scraps with the gun clutched against her breasts.

  The chatter of the Ingram gun had made Schorr’s head swivel around—and Macklin lunged forward, striking at the other man’s side with the mace. He heard Schorr’s ribs break like sticks trodden underfoot. Schorr cried out, tried to backpedal, tripped and fell to his knees. Macklin lifted the mace high and smashed it down on the center of Schorr’s forehead, and the man’s skull dented in the shape of a Nautilus cam. Then Macklin was standing over the body, striking the skull again and again. Schorr’s head started to change shape.

  Roland was on his feet. A short distance away, the crazy woman was stuffing her mouth with the burned food. The flames were growing higher and hotter, and dense smoke whirled past Macklin as, finally, the strength of his left arm gave out. He dropped the mace and gave Schorr’s corpse one last kick to the ribs.

  The smoke got his attention. He watched it sliding into the shaft, which was about three feet high and three feet wide—large enough to crawl through, he realized. It took him a minute to clear the fatigue out of his mind. The smoke was being drawn into the airshaft. Drawn in. Where was it going? To the surface of Blue Dome Mountain? To the outside world?

  He didn’t care about the garbage bag anymore, didn’t care about Schorr or the crazy woman or the Ingram gun. There had to be a way out up there somewhere! He wrenched the grille off and crawled into the shaft. It led upward at a forty degree angle, and Macklin’s feet found the heads of bolts in the aluminum surface to push himself against. There was no light ahead, and the smoke was almost choking, but Macklin knew that this might be their only chance to get out. Roland followed him, inching upward after the King in this new turn of the game.

  Behind them, in the burning gym, they heard the crazy woman’s voice float up into the tunnel: “Where’d everybody go? It’s hot in here ... so hot. God knows I didn’t come all this way to cook in a mine shaft!”

  Something about that voice clutched at Roland’s heart. He remembered a voice like that, a long time ago. He kept moving, but when the crazy woman screamed and the smell of burning meat came up into the tunnel he had to stop and clasp his hands over his ears, because the sound made the world spin too fast and he feared being flung off. The screaming stopped after a while, and all Roland could hear was the steady sliding of the King’s body further along the shaft. Coughing, his eyes watering, Roland pushed himself onward.

  They came to a place where the shaft had been crushed closed. Macklin’s hand found another shaft branching off from the one they’d been following: this one was a tighter fit, and it clamped around the colonel’s shoulders as he squeezed into it. The smoke was still bad, and his lungs were burning. It was like creeping up a chimney with a fire blazing below, and Roland wondered if this was what Santa Claus felt like.

  Further along, Macklin’s questing fingers touched Fiberglas. It was part of the system of air filters and baffles that purified what Earth House residents breathed in case of nuclear attack. Sure helped a whole hell of a lot, didn’t it? he thought grimly. He ripped away the filter and kept crawling. The shaft curved gradually to the left, and Macklin had to tear through more filters and louverlike baffles made of rubber and nylon. He was straining hard to breathe, and he heard Roland gasping behind him. The kid was damned tough, he thought. Anybody who had a will to live like that kid did was a person to reckon with, even if he looked like a ninety-pound weakling.

  Macklin stopped. He’d touched metal ahead of him, blades radiating from a central hub. One of the fans that drew air in from the outside. “We must be close to the surface!” he said. Smoke was still moving past him in the dark. “We’ve got to be close!”

  He put his hand against the fan’s hub and pushed until the muscles in his shoulder cracked. The fan was bolted securely in place and wasn’t going to move. Damn you! he seethed. Damn you to Hell! He pushed again, as hard as he could, but all he did was exhaust himself. The fan wasn’t going to let them out.

  Macklin laid his cheek against cool aluminum and tried to think, tried to picture the blueprints of Earth House in his mind. How were the intake fans serviced? Think! But he was unable to see the blueprints correctly; they kept shivering and falling to pieces.

  “Listen!” Roland cried out.

  Macklin did. He couldn’t hear anything but his own heartbeat and his raw lungs heaving.

  “I hear wind!” Roland said. “I hear wind moving up there!” He reached up, felt the movement of air. The faint sound of shrilling wind came from directly above. He ran his hands over the crumpled wall to his right, then to his left—and he discovered iron rungs. “There’s a way up! There’s another shaft right over our heads!” Grasping the bottom rung, Roland drew himself up, rung by rung, to a standing position. “I’m climbing up,” he told Macklin, and he began to ascend.

  The windscream was louder, but there was still no light. He had climbed maybe twenty feet when his hand touched a metal flywheel over his head. Exploring, his fingers glided over a cracked concrete surface. Roland thought it must be the lid of a hatch, like a submarine’s conning tower hatch that could be opened and closed by the flywheel. But he could feel the strong suction of air there, and he figured the blast must have sprung the hatch, because it was no longer securely sealed.

  He grasped the flywheel, tried to turn it. The thing wouldn’t budge. Roland waited a minute, building up his strength and determination; if ever he needed the power of a King’s Knight, it was at this moment. He attacked the flywheel again; this time he thought it might have moved a half inch, but he wasn’t sure.

  “Roland!” Colonel Macklin called from below. He’d finally put the blueprints together in his mind. The vertical shaft was used by workmen to change the air filters and baffles in this particular sector. “There should be a concrete lid up there! It opens to the surface!”

  “I’ve found it! I’m trying to get it open!” He braced himself with one arm through the nearest rung, grasped the flywheel and tried to turn it with every ounce of muscle left in his body. He shook with the effort, his eyes closed and beads of sweat popped up on his face. Come on! he urged Fate, or God, or rhe Devil, or whoever worked these things. Come on!

  He kept straining against it, unwilling to give up.

  The flywheel moved. An inch. Then two inches. Then four. Roland shouted, “I’ve got it!” and he started cranking the flywheel with a sore and throbbing arm. A chain clattered through the teeth of gears, and now the wind was shrieking. He knew the hatch was lifting, but he saw no light.

  Roland had given the wheel four more revolutions when there was a piercing wail of wind, and the air, full of stinging grit, thrashed madly around the shaft. It almost sucked him right out, and he hung onto a rung with both hands as the wind tore at him. He was weak f
rom his battle with the flywheel, but he knew that if he let go the storm might lift him up into the dark like a kite and never set him down again. He shouted for help, couldn’t even hear his own voice.

  An arm without a hand locked around his waist. Macklin had him, and they slowly descended the rungs together. They retreated into the shaft.

  “We made it!” Macklin shouted over the howling. “That’s the way out!”

  “But we can’t survive in that! It’s a tornado!”

  “It won’t last much longer! It’ll blow itself out! We made it!” He started to cry, but he remembered that discipline and control made the man. He had no conception of time, no idea how long it had been since he’d first seen those bogies on the radar scope. It must be night, but the night of which day he didn’t know.

  His mind drifted toward the people who were still down in Earth House, either dead or insane or lost in the dark. He thought of all the men who’d followed him into this job, who’d had faith in him and respected him. His mouth twitched into a crooked grin. It’s crazy! he thought. All those experienced soldiers and loyal officers lost, and just this skinny kid with bad eyes left to go on at his side. What a joke! All that remained of Macklin’s army was one puny-looking high school geek!

  But he recalled how Roland had rationalized putting the civilians to work, how he’d calmly done the job down in that awful pit where Macklin’s hand remained. The kid had guts. More than guts; something about Roland Croninger made Macklin a little uneasy, like knowing a deadly little thing was hiding beneath a flat rock you had to step over. It had been in the kid’s eyes when Roland had told him about Schorr waylaying him in the cafeteria, and in his voice when Roland had said, “We’ve got hands.” Macklin knew one thing for sure: He’d rather have the kid at his side than at his back.