Swan Song

by Robert R. McCammon

  Since crossing over into Pennsylvania, passing a big green sign that said WELCOME TO PENNSYLVANIA, THE KEYSTONE STATE about thirty miles and seven days ago, they had found almost three hundred frozen bodies on Interstate 80. They’d sheltered for a while in a town called Stroudsburg, which had been decimated by a tornado. The houses and buildings lay scattered under the filthy snow like the broken toys of a mad giant, and there’d been plenty of corpses, too. Sister and Artie had found a pickup truck—the tank drained of gas—on the town’s main thoroughfare and had slept in the cab. Then it was back onto the interstate again, heading west in their supple, blood-filled boots, passing more carnage, wrecked cars and overturned trailers that must have been caught in a crush of traffic fleeing westward.

  The going was rough. They could make, at the most, five miles a day before they had to find shelter—the remnants of a house, a barn, a wrecked car—anything to hold back the wind. In twenty-one days of traveling they’d seen only three other living people; two of those were raving mad, and the third had fled wildly into the woods when he’d seen them coming. Both Sister and Artie had been sick for a while, had coughed and thrown up blood and suffered splitting headaches. Sister had thought she was going to die, and they’d slept huddled together, each of them breathing like a bellows; but the worst of the sickness and weak, feverish dizziness had gone, and though they both sometimes still coughed uncontrollably and vomited up a little blood, their strength had returned, and they had no more headaches.

  They left the four corpses behind and soon came to the wreckage of an exploded Airstream trailer. A scorched Cadillac had smashed into it, and a Subaru had rear-ended the Caddy. Nearby, two other vehicles had locked and burned. Further on, another group of people lay where they’d frozen to death, their bodies curled around one another in a vain search for warmth. Sister passed them without pausing; the face of death was no stranger to her now, but she couldn’t stand to look too closely.

  About fifty yards further, Sister stopped abruptly. Just ahead of her, through the tumbling snow, an animal was gnawing at one of two corpses that lay against the right-hand guardrail. The thing looked up and tensed. It was a large dog, Sister saw—maybe a wolf, come down from the mountains to feed. The beast was about the size of a German shepherd, with a long snout and a reddish-gray hide. It had chewed a leg down to the bone, and now it crouched over its prize and stated menacingly at Sister.

  If that bastard wants fresh meat, we’re dead, she thought. She stared back at the thing, and they challenged each other for about thirty seconds. Then the animal gave a short, muttering growl and returned to its gnawing. Sister and Artie gave it a wide berth, and they kept looking back until they’d rounded a curve and the thing was out of sight.

  Sister shuddered under her weight of clothes. The beast’s eyes had reminded her of Doyle Halland’s.

  Her fear of Doyle Halland was worst when darkness fell—and there seemed to be no regularity to the coming of darkness, no twilight or sense of the sun going away. The darkness might fall after two or three hours of gloom, or it might hold off for what seemed like twenty-four hours—but when it did fall, it was absolute. In the dark, every noise was enough to make Sister sit up and listen, her heart pounding and cold sweat popping up on her face. She had something the Doyle Halland–thing wanted, something he didn’t understand—as she certainly did not—but that he’d vowed to follow her to get. And what would he do with the glass ring if he got it? Smash it to pieces? Probably so. She kept looking over her shoulder as she walked, fearful of seeing a dark figure coming up behind her, its face malformed, with jagged teeth showing in a sharklike grin.

  “I’ll find you,” he’d promised. “I’ll find you, bitch.”

  The day before, they’d sheltered in a broken-down barn and had made a small fire in the hay. Sister had taken the glass ring from her duffel bag. She’d thought of her future-predicting glass eight-ball, and she’d mentally asked: What’s ahead for us?

  Of course, there was no little white polyhedron surfacing with all-purpose answers. But the colors of the jewels and their pulsing, steady rhythm had soothed her; she’d felt herself drifting, entranced by the glow of the ring, and then it seemed as if all her attention, all her being, was drawn deeper and deeper into the glass, deeper and deeper, as if into the very heart of fire....

  And then she’d gone dreamwalking again, across that barren landscape where the dome of dirt was, and the Cookie Monster doll lay waiting for a lost child. But this time it was different; this time, she’d been dreamwalking toward the dome—with the sensation of her feet not quite touching the earth—when she suddenly stopped and listened.

  She thought she’d heard something over the noise of the wind— a muffled sound that might have been a human voice. She listened, strained to hear it again, but could not.

  And then she saw a small hole in the baked ground, almost at her feet. As she watched, she imagined that she saw the hole begin to widen, and the earth crack and strain around it. In the next moment ... yes, yes, the earth was cracking, and the hole was getting larger, as if something was burrowing underneath it. She stared, both fearful and fascinated, as the sides of the hole crumbled, and she thought, I am not alone.

  From the hole came a human hand.

  It was splotched with gray and white—a large hand, the hand of a giant—and the thick fingers had clawed upward like those of a dead man digging himself out of a grave.

  The sight had startled her so much that she’d jerked backward from the widening hole. She was afraid to see what kind of monster was emerging, and as she ran across the empty plain she’d wished frantically, Take me back, please, I want to go back where I was....

  And she was sitting before the small fire in the broken-down barn. Artie was looking at her quizzically, the raw flesh around his eyes like the Lone Ranger’s mask.

  She’d told him what she’d seen, and he asked her what she thought it meant. Of course, she couldn’t say; of course, it was probably just something plucked from her mind, perhaps a response to seeing all the corpses on the highway. Sister had put the glass ring back in her duffel bag, but the image of that hand stretching upward from the earth was burned into her brain. She could not shake it.

  Now, as she trudged through the snow, she touched the ring’s outline in the canvas bag. Just knowing it was there reassured her, and right now that was all the magic she needed.

  Her knees locked.

  Another wolf or wild dog or whatever it was stood in the road before her, about fifteen feet away. This one was skinny, with raw red sores on its hide. Its eyes bored into hers, and the lips slowly pulled away from the fangs in a snarl.

  Oh, shit! was her first reaction. This one looked hungrier and more desperate than the other. And behind it in the gray snow were two or three more, loping to the right and left.

  She looked over her shoulder, past Artie. Two more wolf shapes were behind them, half hidden by the snow but near enough that Sister could see their outlines.

  Her second reaction was, Our butts are hambur—

  Something leaped from the left—a blur of motion—and slammed into Artie’s side. He yelled in pain as he fell, and the beast—which Sister thought might have been the reddish-gray animal they’d seen feasting on a corpse—grabbed part of Artie’s knapsack between its teeth and violently shook its head back and forth, trying to rip the pack off. Sister reached down to grasp Artie’s outstretched hand, but the beast dragged Artie about ten feet through the snow before it let go and darted off just to the edge of visibility. It continued to circle and lick its chops.

  She heard a guttural growl and turned just as the skinny animal with the red sores leaped for her. It struck her shoulder and knocked her sprawling, the jaws snapping shut inches from her face with a noise like a bear trap cracking together. She smelled rotted meat on its breath, and then the animal had the right sleeve of her coat and was tearing at it. Another beast feinted in from the left, and a third darted boldly forward and grabbed
her right foot, trying to drag her. She thrashed and yelled; the skinny one spooked and ran, but the other one pulled her on her side through the snow. She grasped the duffel bag in both arms and kicked with her left boot, hitting the beast three times in the skull before it yelped and released her.

  Behind her, Artie was attacked by two at once, from opposite sides. One caught his wrist, the teeth almost meeting flesh through his heavy coat and sweater, the second snapping at his left shoulder and worrying him with a frenzied surge of strength. “Get off! Get off!” he was screaming as they strained at each other to pull him in different directions.

  Sister tried to stand. She slipped in the snow, fell heavily again. Panic hit her like a punch to the gut. She saw Artie being dragged by an animal that held his wrist, and she realized the beasts were trying to separate them, much like they might separate a herd of deer or cattle. As she was struggling up one of the things lunged in and grabbed her ankle, dragging her another few yards from Artie. Now he was just a struggling form, surrounded by the shapes of the circling animals in the swirling gray murk.

  “Get away, you bastard!” she shouted. The animal jerked her so hard she thought her leg had popped from its socket. With a scream of rage, Sister swung the duffel bag at it, clipping its snout, and the thing turned tail. But a second later another one was straddling her, its fangs snapping for her throat; she threw her arm up, and the jaws clamped onto it with brutal force. The wolf-dog started shredding the cloth of her coat. She swung her left fist at it, caught it in the ribs and heard it grunt, but it kept tearing through the coat, now reaching the first layer of sweater. Sister knew this sonofabitch wasn’t stopping until he tasted meat. She hit it again and tried to wrench free, but now something had her ankle again and was pulling her in another direction. She had the crazy mental image of saltwater taffy being stretched until it snapped.

  She heard a sharp crack! and thought that this time her leg had broken. But the beast that was worrying her shoulder yelped and jumped, running madly off through the snow. There was a second crack! followed closely by a third. The wolf-dog that had her ankle shuddered and shrieked, and Sister saw blood spewing from a hole in its side. The animal let her go and began to spin in a circle, snapping at its tail. A fourth shot rang out—Sister realized the beast had been pierced by a bullet—and she heard an agonized howling over where Artie Wisco lay. Then the others were fleeing, slipping and sliding and crashing into one another in their haste to escape. They were gone from sight within five seconds.

  The wounded animal fell on its side a few feet away from Sister, its legs kicking frantically. She sat up, stunned and dumbfounded, and saw Artie struggling to rise, too. His feet went out from under him, and he flopped down again.

  A figure wearing a dark green ski mask, a beat-up brown leather jacket and blue jeans glided past Sister. He had on snowshoes laced around battered boots, and slung around his neck was a cord that pierced the necks of three empty plastic jugs, knotted at the ends to keep them from sliding off. On his back was a dark green hiker’s pack, a bit smaller than the ones Sister and Artie carried.

  He stood over Sister. “You okay?” His voice sounded like steel wool scrubbing a cast-iron skillet.

  “Yeah, I think so.” She had bruises on bruises, but nothing was broken.

  He planted the rifle he was carrying butt first in the snow, then unwrapped the cord that held the plastic jugs from around his shoulder. He set these down, too, near the still-kicking animal. His pack was shrugged off, and then he unzipped it with gloved fingers and took out an assortment of various-sized Tupperware bowls with sealed plastic lids. He set them in an orderly row in the snow before him.

  Artie came trudging toward them, holding his wrist. The man with the ski mask looked up quickly and then continued his work, taking off his gloves and untying one of the knots in the cord so he could slide the jugs off. “Sonofabitch get you?” he asked Artie.

  “Yeah. Gashed my hand. I’m okay, though. Where’d you come from?”

  “That way.” He jerked his head toward the woods, then began to uncap the plastic jugs with rapidly reddening fingers. The animal was still kicking violently. The man stood up, pulled his rifle out of the snow and began to smash the animal’s skull in with the weapon’s butt. It took a minute to finish, but then the beast made a muffled, moaning sound, trembled and lay still. “I didn’t think anybody else would be coming this way,” the man said. “Thought everybody was long gone by now.” He knelt again next to the body, took a knife with a long, curved blade from a pouch at his belt and cut a slit in the gray underbelly. The blood gouted. He reached for one of the plastic jugs and held it beneath the stream; the blood pattered merrily in, rapidly filling up the jug. He capped it, put it aside and reached for another as Sister and Artie watched with sickened fascination. “Thought everybody else must be dead by now,” he continued, paying close attention to his work. “Where are you two from?”

  “Uh ... Detroit,” Artie managed to say.

  “We came from Manhattan,” Sister told him. “We’re on our way to Detroit.”

  “You run out of gas? Have a blowout?”

  “No. We’re walking.”

  He grunted, glanced at her and then went back to his task. The stream of blood was weakening. “Long way to walk,” he said. “Hell of a long way, especially for nothing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that there’s no Detroit anymore. It was blown away. Just like there’s no Pittsburgh or Indianapolis or Chicago or Philadelphia anymore. I’d be surprised if any city’s left. By now, I guess the radiation’s done a number on the little towns, too.” The flow of blood had almost stopped. He capped the second jug, which was about half full, and then he carved a longer slit in the dead animal’s belly. He thrust his naked hands into the steaming wound up to his wrists.

  “You don’t know that!” Artie said. “You can’t know that!”

  “I know,” the man replied, but he offered nothing more. “Lady,” he said, “start opening those Tupperware bowls for me, will you?”

  She did as he asked, and he started pulling out handfuls of bloody, steaming intestines. He chopped them up and began filling the bowls. “Did I get that other bastard?” he asked Artie.

  “What?”

  “The other one I shot at. I think you’ll remember that it was chewing on your arm.”

  “Oh. Right. Yeah.” Artie watched the guts being stuffed into brightly colored Tupperware bowls. “No. I mean ... I think you hit him, but he let me go and ran off.”

  “They can be tough motherfuckers,” he said, and then he began to carve the animal’s head from its neck. “Open that big bowl, lady,” he told her.

  He reached up into the severed head, and the brains plopped into the big bowl.

  “You can put the lids on now,” he said.

  Sister did, about to choke on the coppery smell of blood. He wiped his hands on the beast’s hide and then slid the two jugs back on the cord and retied the knot; he put his gloves back on, returned the knife to its pouch and the filled Tupperware containers to his pack, and then rose to a standing position. “You two got any guns?”

  “No,” Sister said.

  “How about food?”

  “We’ve ... we’ve got some canned vegetables and fruit juice. And some cold cuts, too.”

  “Cold cuts,” he repeated disdainfully. “Lady, you can’t go very far in this weather on cold cuts. You say you’ve got some vegetables? I hope it’s not broccoli. I hate broccoli.”

  “No ... we’ve got some corn, and green beans, and boiled potatoes.”

  “Sounds like the makings of a stew to me. My cabin’s about two miles north of here, as the crow flies. If you want to go back with me, you’ll be welcome. If not, I’ll say have a good trip to Detroit.”

  “What’s the nearest town?” Sister asked.

  “St. Johns, I guess. Hazleton’s the nearest town of any size, and that’s about ten miles south of St. Johns. There may be a few p
eople left, but after that flood of refugees washed in from the east I’d be surprised if you’d find much in any town along I-80. St. Johns is about four or five miles west.” The man looked at Artie, who was dripping blood onto the snow. “Friend, that’s going to attract every scavenger within smelling distance—and believe me, some of those bastards can sniff blood a long, long way.”

  “We ought to go with him,” Artie said to Sister. “I might bleed to death!”

  “I doubt it,” the man countered. “Not from a scratch like that. It’ll freeze up pretty soon, but you’ll have a blood smell on your clothes. Like I say, they’ll come out of the mountains with knives and forks between their teeth. But you do what you want to do; I’m hitting the trail.” He shrugged into his pack, wrapped the cord around his shoulder and picked up his rifle. “Take care,” he said, and he started gliding across the snowy highway toward the woods.

  It took Sister about two more seconds to make up her mind. “Wait a minute!” He stopped. “Okay. We’ll come with you, Mr.—”

  But he was already moving again, heading into the edge of the dense forest.

  They had no choice but to hurry after him. Artie looked over his shoulder, terrified of more lurking predators coming up behind him. His ribs ached where the beast had hit him, and his legs felt like short pieces of soft rubber. He and Sister entered the woods after the shuffling figure of the man in the ski mask and left the highway of death behind.

  31

  THE OUTLINES OF SMALL, blocky one-story buildings and red brick houses began to appear from the deepening scarlet gloom. A town, Josh realized. Thank God!