Swan Song

by Robert R. McCammon

  The horse flinched but ceased jittering around; its fear-filled eyes were fixed on the little girl, steam curling from its nostrils, its lungs rumbling. Its legs trembled as if they might give way or take flight.

  The terrier kept yapping, and Swan pointed a finger at it. “Hush!” she said. The dog scrambled away a few feet but caught back the next bark; then, as if deciding it had come too close to the humans and compromised its independence, darted away into the cornfield. It stood its distance and continued to bark intermittently.

  Swan’s attention was aimed at the horse, and she kept its eyes locked with her own. Its large, less-than-lovely head trembled, wanting to pull away from her, but it either would not or could not. “Is it a boy or a girl?” Swan asked Josh.

  “Huh?” He still thought he felt roaches running up and down his backbone, but he shifted the lantern’s beam. “A boy,” he said. And a whopper of a boy, he thought.

  “He hasn’t seen people for a long time, I bet. Look at him; he doesn’t know whether to be glad to see us or to run away.”

  “He must’ve belonged to the Jaspins,” Josh said.

  “Did you find them in the house?” She kept watching the horse’s eyes.

  “Yes. I mean ... no, I didn’t. I found signs of them. They must’ve packed up and gone.” There was no way he was letting Swan into that house.

  The horse rumbled nervously, its legs moving from side to side for a few steps.

  Swan slowly lifted her hand toward the horse’s muzzle.

  “Be careful,” Josh warned. “He’ll snap your fingers right off!”

  Swan continued to reach upward, slowly and surely. The horse backed away, its nostrils wide and its ears flicking back and forth. It lowered its head, sniffing the ground, then pretended to be looking off in another direction, but Swan saw the animal appraising her, trying to make up his mind about them. “We’re not going to hurt you,” Swan said quietly, her voice soothing. She stepped toward the horse, and he snorted a nervous warning.

  “Watch out! He might charge you or something!” Josh knew absolutely nothing about horses, and they’d always scared him. This one was big and ugly and ungainly, with shaggy hooves and a floppy tail and a swayed back that looked like he’d been saddled with an anvil.

  “He’s not too sure about us,” Swan told Josh. “He’s still making up his mind whether to run or not, but I think he’s kind of glad to see people again.”

  “What are you, an expert on horses?”

  “No. I can just tell, from the set of his ears and the way his tail is swishing back and forth. Look at how he’s smelling us—he doesn’t want to seem too friendly. Horses have got a lot of pride. I think this one likes people, and he’s been lonely.”

  Josh shrugged. “I sure can’t tell any of that.”

  “My mama and I lived in a motel one time, next to a pasture where somebody’s horses grazed. I used to climb over the fence and walk around with them, and I guess I learned how to talk to them, too.”

  “Talk to them? Come on!”

  “Well, not human talk,” she amended. “A horse talks with his ears and tail, and how he holds his head and his body. He’s talking right now,” she said as the horse snorted and gave a nervous whinny.

  “What’s he saying?”

  “He’s saying ... that he wants to know what we’re talking about.” Swan continued to lift her hand toward the animal’s muzzle.

  “Watch your fingers!”

  The horse retreated a pace. Swan’s hand continued to rise—slowly, slowly. “No one’s going to hurt you,” Swan said, in a voice that sounded to Josh like the music of a lute, or a lyre, or some instrument that people had forgotten how to play. Its soothing quality almost made him forget the horrors tied to chairs back in the Jaspin farmhouse.

  “Come on,” Swan urged. “We won’t hurt you.” Her fingers were inches away from the muzzle, and Josh started to reach out and pull her back before she lost them to crunching teeth.

  The horse’s ears twitched and slanted forward. He snorted again, pawed at the ground and lowered his head to accept Swan’s touch.

  “That’s right,” Swan said. “That’s right, boy.” She scratched his muzzle, and he pushed inquisitively at her arm with his nose.

  Josh wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen it. Still, Swan was probably right; the horse simply missed people. “I think you’ve made a friend. Doesn’t look like much of a horse, though. Looks like a swayback mule in a clown suit.”

  “I think he’s kind of pretty.” Swan rubbed between the horse’s eyes, and the animal obediently lowered his head so she wouldn’t have to stretch up so far. The horse’s eyes were still frightened, and Swan knew if she made a sudden move he’d bolt into the cornfield and probably not return, so she kept all her movements slow and precise. She thought that the horse was likely old, because there was a weary patience in the droop of his head and flanks, as if he was resigned to a life of pulling a plow across the very field in which they stood. His dappled skin jittered and jumped, but he allowed Swan to rub his head and made a low noise in his throat that sounded like a sigh of relief.

  “I left Leona over by the house,” Josh said. “We’d better get back.”

  Swan nodded and turned away from the horse, following Josh through the field. She’d taken about a half-dozen steps when she sensed rather than heard the heavy footfalls in the dirt behind her; she looked over her shoulder. The horse stopped, freezing like a statue. Swan continued after Josh, and the horse followed at a respectful distance, at its own ambling pace. The terrier darted out and yapped a couple of times just for the sake of being nettlesome, and the piebald horse kicked its hind hooves backward in disdain and showered the dog with dirt.

  Leona was sitting on the ground, massaging her knees. Josh’s light was coming, and when they reappeared from the field she saw Swan and the horse in the beam’s backwash. “Lord A’mighty! What’d you find?”

  “This thing was running wild out there,” Josh told her, helping her to her feet. “Swan charmed the horseshoes right off him, got him settled down.”

  “Oh?” Leona’s eyes found the little girl’s, and she smiled know-ingly. “Did she?” Leona hobbled forward to look at the horse. “Must’ve belonged to Homer. He had three or four horses out here. Well, he’s not the handsomest animal I’ve ever seen, but he’s got four strong legs, don’t he?”

  “Looks like a mule to me,” Josh said. “Those hooves are as big as skillets.” He caught a whiff of decay from the Jaspin farmhouse. The horse’s head jerked, and he whinnied as if he’d smelled death as well. “We’d better get out of this wind.” Josh motioned toward the barn with his lantern. He put the pistol and the lantern back in the wheelbarrow and went on ahead to make sure whoever had killed Homer and Maggie Jaspin wasn’t hiding in there, waiting for them. He wondered who Lord Alvin was—but he was surely in no hurry to find out. Behind him, Swan picked up her bag and Crybaby, and Leona followed with her suitcase. Trailing them at a distance was the horse, and the terrier yapped at their backs and began to roam around the farmyard like a soldier on patrol.

  Josh checked the barn out thoroughly and found no one else there. Plenty of hay was strewn about, and the horse came inside with them and made himself at home. Josh unpacked the blankets from the wheelbarrow, hung the lantern from a wall and opened a can of beef stew for their dinner. The horse sniffed around them for a while, more interested in hay than in canned stew; he returned when Josh opened a Mason jar of well water, and Josh poured a bit out for him in an empty bucket. The horse licked it up and came back for more. Josh obliged him, and the animal pawed the ground like a newborn colt. “Get out of here, mule!” Josh said when the horse’s tongue tried to slip into the Mason jar.

  After most of the stew was gone and just the juice remained, Swan took the can outside and left it for the terrier, as well as the rest of the water from the Mason jar. The dog came to within ten feet, then waited for Swan to go back into the barn before coming an
y closer.

  Swan slept under one of the blankets. The horse, which Josh had christened Mule, ambled back and forth, chomping on hay and peering out through the cracked door at the dark farmhouse. The terrier continued to patrol the area for a while longer; then it found a place to shelter against one of the outside walls and lay down to rest.

  “Both of them were dead,” Leona said as Josh sat against a post with a blanket draped over his shouders.

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “No. And neither do you. We’ve got another long, hard day tomorrow.”

  She waited for a few minutes to see if he would tell her or not, but she really didn’t want to know. She pulled her blanket over her and went to sleep.

  Josh was afraid to close his eyes, because he knew what was waiting for him behind the lids. Across the barn, Mule rumbled quietly; it was an oddly reassuring sound, like the noise of heat coming through a vent into a cold room, or a town crier signaling that all was well. Josh knew he had to get some sleep, and he was about to close his eyes when he detected a small movement just to his right. He stared and saw a little roach crawling slowly over the scattered bits of hay. Josh balled up his fist and started to slam it down on the insect, but his hand paused in midair.

  Everything alive’s got its own way of speaking and knowing, Swan had said. Everything alive.

  He stayed the killing blow, watching the insect struggle tenaciously onward, getting caught in pieces of hay and working itself loose, plowing forward with stubborn, admirable determination.

  Josh opened his fist and drew his arm back. The insect kept going, out of the light’s range and into the darkness on its purposeful journey. Who am I to kill such a thing? he asked himself. Who am I to deliver death to even the lowest form of life?

  He listened to the keening of the wind whistling through holes in the walls, and he pondered the thought that there might be something out there in the dark—God or Devil or something more elemental than either—that looked at humankind as Josh had viewed the roach—less than intelligent, certainly nasty, but struggling onward on its journey, never giving up, fighting through obstacles or going around them, doing whatever it had to do to survive.

  And he hoped that if the time ever came for that elemental fist to come crashing down, its wielder might take a moment of pause as well.

  Josh drew the blanket around himself and lay down in the straw to sleep.

  38

  “THIS IS OUR POWER!” Colonel Macklin said, holding up the .45 automatic he’d taken off the dead young man from California.

  “No,” Roland Croninger replied. “This is our power.” And he held up one of the bottles of pills from Sheila Fontana’s drug cache.

  “Hey!” Sheila grabbed at it, but Roland held it out of her reach. “That’s my stash! You can’t—”

  “Sit down,” Macklin told her. She hesitated, and he rested the pistol on his knee. “Sit down,” he repeated.

  She cursed quietly and sat down in the filthy pit while the kid continued to tell the one-handed war hero how the pills and cocaine were stronger than any gun could ever be.

  Dawn came with a cancerous, yellow sky and needles of rain. A black-haired woman, a man with one hand in a dirty overcoat, and a boy wearing goggles trudged across the landscape of rotting corpses and wrecked vehicles. Sheila Fontana was holding up a pair of white panties as a flag of truce, and close behind her Macklin kept the .45 aimed at the small of her back. Roland Croninger, bringing up the rear, carried Sheila’s knapsack. He remembered how the woman’s hair had felt in his hands, how her body had moved like a roller-coaster ride; he wanted to have sex again, and he would hate it if she made a wrong move now and had to be executed. Because after all, they’d shown her the highest chivalry last night; they’d saved her from the rabble, and they’d given her some food—dog biscuits they’d been living on from the wreck of a camper, the dog’s carcass having been consumed long ago—and a place to rest after they were done with her.

  They reached the edge of the dirtwart land and started across open territory. Ahead of them lay the tents, cars and cardboard shelters of the privileged people who lived on the lake shore. They were about halfway across, heading for a battered, dented Airstream trailer at the center of the encampment, when they heard the warning shout: “Dirtwarts coming in! Wake up! Dirtwarts coming in!”

  “Keep going,” Macklin told Sheila when she faltered. “Keep waving those panties, too.”

  People started coming out of their shelters. In truth, they were every bit as ragged and dirty as the dirtwarts, but they had guns and supplies of canned food and bottled water, and most of them had escaped serious burns. The majority of dirtwarts, on the other hand, were severely burned, had contagious illnesses or were insane. Macklin understood the balance of power. It was centered within the Airstream trailer, a shining mansion amid the other hovels.

  “Turn back, fuckers!” a man hollered from a tent’s entrance; he aimed a high-velocity rifle at them. “Go back!” a woman shouted, and someone threw an empty can that hit the ground a few feet in front of Sheila. She stopped, and Macklin pushed her on with a shove of the automatic.

  “Keep moving. And smile.”

  “Go back, you filth!” a second man, wearing the remnants of an Air Force uniform and a coat stained with dried blood, shouted; he had a revolver, and he came within twenty feet of them. “You graverobbers!” he shouted. “You dirty, lice-ridden ... heathen!”

  Macklin didn’t worry about him; he was a young man, maybe in his mid-twenties, and his eyes kept sneaking toward Sheila Fontana. He wasn’t going to do anything. Other people approached them, shouting and jeering, brandishing guns and rifles, knives and even a bayonet. Rocks, bottles and cans were thrown, and though they came dangerously close, none of them connected. “Don’t you bring your diseases in here!” a middle-aged man in a brown raincoat and woolen cap hollered. He was holding an axe. “I’ll kill you if you take another goddamned step!”

  Macklin wasn’t worried about him, either. The men were puzzled by Sheila Fontana’s presence, but he recognized the lust on their faces as they surged around, hollering threats. He saw a thin young woman with stringy brown hair, her body engulfed in a yellow raincoat and her sunken eyes fixed on Sheila with deadly intent. She was carrying a butcher knife, fingering the blade. Macklin did feel a pang of worry about her, and he guided Sheila away from the young woman. An empty can hit him in the side of the head and glanced off. Someone came close enough to spit on Roland. “Keep going, keep going,” Macklin said quietly, his eyes narrowed and ticking back and forth.

  Roland heard shouts and taunting laughter behind them, and he glanced over his shoulder. Back in the dirtwart land, about thirty or forty dirtwarts had crawled from their holes and were jumping up and down, screaming like animals in expectation of a slaughter.

  Macklin smelled salt water. Before him, through the misting rain and beyond the encampment, the Great Salt Lake stretched to the far horizon; it smelled antiseptic, like the halls of a hospital. The stump of Macklin’s wrist burned and seethed with infection, and he longed to plunge it into the healing water, to baptize himself in cleansing agony.

  A burly, bearded red-haired man in a leather jacket and dungarees, a bandage plastered to his forehead, stepped in front of Sheila. He aimed a double-barreled shotgun at Macklin’s head. “That’s as far as you go.”

  Sheila stopped, her eyes wide. She waved the pair of panties in front of his face. “Hey, don’t shoot! We don’t want any trouble!”

  “He won’t shoot,” Macklin said easily, smiling at the bearded man. “See, my friend, I’ve got a gun pointed at the young lady’s back. If you blow my head off—and if any of you dumb fucks shoot either me or the boy—my finger’s going to twitch on this trigger and sever her spine. Look at her, fellas! Just look! Not a burn on her! Not a burn anywhere! Oh, yeah, fill your eyes full, but don’t touch! Isn’t she something?”

  Sheila had the imp
ulse to pull her T-shirt up and give the gawkers a tit show; if the war hero had ever decided to give pimping a try, he’d have racked up. But this whole experience was so unreal, it was almost like flying on a tab of LSD, and she found herself grinning, about to laugh. The filthy men who stood around her with their guns and knives just stared, and further behind them was a collection of skinny, dirty women who watched her with absolute hatred.

  Macklin saw they were about fifty feet from the Airstream trailer. “We want to see the Fat Man,” he told the guy with the beard.

  “Sure!” The other man hadn’t lowered his shotgun yet. His mouth curled sarcastically. “He sees dirtwarts all the time! Serves ’em champagne and caviar!” He snorted. “Who the fuck do you think you are, mister?”

  “My name is Colonel James B. Macklin. I served in Vietnam as a pilot, and I was shot down and spent one year in a hole that makes this place look like the Ritz-Carlton. I’m a military man, you dumb bastard!” Macklin’s face was reddening. Discipline and control, he told himself. Discipline and control makes the man. He took a couple of deep breaths; around him several people jeered at him, and someone’s spit landed on his right cheek. “We want to see the Fat Man. He’s the leader here, isn’t he? He’s the one with the most food and guns?”

  “Run ’em out!” a stocky, curly-haired woman shouted, brandishing a long barbecue fork. “We don’t want their damned diseases!”

  Roland heard a pistol being cocked, and he knew someone was holding a gun just behind his head. He flinched, but then he turned slowly around, grinning rigidly. A blond-haired boy about his age, wearing a bulky plaid jacket, was aiming a .38 right between his eyes. “You stink,” the blond-haired kid said, his dead brown eyes challenging Roland to make a move. Roland stood very still, his heart going like a jackhammer.