Swan Song

by Robert R. McCammon

  In the passenger seat, Steve Buchanan stuck the Magnum’s barrel through the slit of his rolled-down window and took aim, but before he could fire the animal had vanished into the woods again. “Jesus H. Christ,” Steve said. “Those fuckers are comin’ out of the woodwork now. This is a suicide mission, man!”

  Another wolf ran in front of the truck, taunting them. Paul could’ve sworn the bastard smiled. His own face was set like stone as he concentrated on weaving a path through the wreckage, but inside he was lanced by icy fear of a kind he’d never known. There would not be enough bullets to hold off the wolves when the time came. The people in the truck would look to him for help, but he would fail them. I’m afraid. Oh, dear God, I’m afraid. He picked up the bottle of Johnnie Walker Red that sat between himself and the teenager, uncapped it with his teeth and took a swig that made his eyes water. He handed it to Steve, who drank some courage of his own.

  For perhaps the hundredth time in the last five minutes, Paul glanced at the gas gauge. The needle was about three hairs shy of the big red E. They’d passed two gas stations in the last fifteen miles, and Paul’s worst nightmares were coming true; one of the stations had been razed to the ground, and the other had a sign that said

  NO GAS NO GUNS NO MONEY NO NOTHING.

  The pickup labored west under a leaden sky. The highway was a junkyard of wrecked hulks and frozen, wolf-gnawed corpses. Paul had seen a dozen or so wolves trailing them. Waiting for us to start walking, he knew. They can smell that tank drying up. Damn it to Hell, why did we leave the cabin? We were safe! We could’ve stayed there—

  Forever? He wondered.

  A gust of wind hit the pickup broadside, and the vehicle shuddered right down to its slick treads. Paul’s knuckles turned white as he fought the wheel. The kerosene had run out a day earlier, and the day before that Artie Wisco had begun coughing up blood. The cabin was twenty miles behind them now. They’d passed a point of no return, everything around them desolate and as gray as undertakers’ fingers. I should never have listened to that crazy woman! He thought, taking the bottle from Steve. She’ll get us all killed yet!

  “Suicide mission, man,” Steve repeated, a crooked grin carved across his burn-scarred face.

  Sister sat beside Artie in the rear of the truck, both of them protected from the wind by a blanket. She was holding onto Paul’s rifle; he’d taught her how to load and fire it, and had told her to blow hell out of any wolves that got too close. The fifteen or so that were following slipped back and forth between the wreckage, and Sister decided not to waste bullets.

  Nearby, also covered by a blanket, were the Ramseys and the old man who’d forgotten his name. The old man clutched the shortwave radio, though the batteries had died days ago. Over the engine’s racket, Sister could hear Artie’s agonized breathing. He held his side, blood flecking his lips, his face contorted with pain. The only chance for him was to find medical help of some kind, and Sister had come too far with him to let him die without a struggle.

  Sister had one arm around the duffel bag. The previous night she’d looked into the shining jewels of the glass circle and seen another strange image: what appeared to be a roadside sign at night, dimly illuminated by a distant glow, that read Welcome to Matheson, Kansas! We’re Strong, Proud and Growing!

  She’d had the impression of dreamwalking along a highway that led toward a light, reflected off the bellies of low clouds; there were figures around her, but she couldn’t quite make out who they were. Then, abruptly, she’d lost her grip on the vision, and she was back in the cabin, sitting in front of a dying fire.

  She’d never heard of Matheson, Kansas, before—if there was really such a place. Looking into the depths of the glass ring caused the imagination to boil like soup in a stockpot, and why should what bubbled out of it have any connection with reality?

  But what if there was a Matheson, Kansas? She’d asked herself. Would that mean her visions of a desert where a Cookie Monster doll lay and of a table where fortune-telling cards were arranged were also real places? No! Of course not! I used to be crazy, but I’m not crazy anymore, she’d thought. It was all imagination, all wisps of fantasy that the colors of the glass circle created in the mind.

  “I want it,” the thing in its Doyle Halland disguise had said, back in that bloody room in New Jersey. “I want it.”

  And I have it, Sister thought. Me, of all possible people. Why me?

  She answered her own question: Because when I want to hold onto something, even the Devil himself can’t pry it loose, that’s why.

  “Goin’ to Detroit!” Artie said. He was smiling, his eyes bright with fever. “’Bout time I got home, don’t you think?”

  “You’re going to be all right.” She took his hand. The flesh was wet and hot. “We’re going to find some medicine for you.”

  “Oh, she’s gonna be sooooo mad at me!” he continued. “I was supposed to call her that night. I went out with the boys. Supposed to call her. Let her down.”

  “No, you didn’t. It’s all right. You just be quiet and—”

  Mona Ramsey screamed.

  Sister looked up. A yellow-eyed wolf the size of a Doberman had scrambled up on the rear bumper and was trying to hitch itself over the tailgate. The animal’s jaws snapped wantonly at the air. Sister had no time to aim or fire; she just clubbed the beast’s skull with the rifle barrel, and the wolf yelped and dropped back to the highway. It was gone into the woods before Sister could get her finger on the trigger. Four others who’d been shadowing the truck scattered for cover.

  Mona Ramsey was babbling hysterically. “Hush!” Sister demanded. The young woman stopped her jabbering and gaped at her. “You’re making me nervous, dear,” Sister said. “I get very cranky when I’m nervous.”

  The pickup swerved over ice, its right side scraping along the wreckage of a six-car pileup before Paul could regain control. He threaded a passageway between wrecks, but the highway ahead was an auto graveyard. More animals skulked at the edges of the road, watching the pickup rumble past.

  The gas gauge’s needle touched E. “We’re running on fumes,” Paul said, and he wondered how far they could get on the Johnnie Walker Red.

  “Hey! Look there!” Steve Buchanan pointed. To the right, over the leafless trees, was a tall Shell gas station sign. They rounded a curve, and they both saw the Shell station—abandoned, with REPENT! HELL IS ON EARTH! Painted in white across the windows. Which was just as well, Paul reasoned, because the off-ramp was blocked by the mangled hulk of a bus and two other crashed vehicles.

  “Good shoes!” Artie said in the rear of the truck. Sister dragged her gaze away from the message—or warning—on the Shell station’s windows. “Nothin’ beats a pair of good, comfortable walkin’ shoes!” He lost his breath and began coughing, and Sister cleaned his mouth with an edge of the blanket.

  The pickup truck stuttered.

  Paul felt the blood drain from his face. “Come on, come on!” They’d just started up a hill; its top was about a quarter mile away, and if they could make it they could coast down the other side. Paul leaned forward against the steering wheel, as if to shove the truck the rest of the way. The engine rattled and wheezed, and Paul knew it was about to give up the ghost. The tires kept turning, though, and the truck was still climbing the hill.

  “Come on!” he shouted as the engine caught, sputtered—and then died.

  The tires rolled on about twenty yards, getting slower and slower, before the truck stopped. Then the tires began to roll backward.

  Paul plunged his foot on the brake, pulled up the parking brake and put the gears into first. The truck halted about a hundred yards from the hilltop.

  Silence fell.

  “That’s that,” Paul said. Steve Buchanan was sitting with one hand on the Magnum and the other strangling the scotch bottle’s neck.

  “What now, man?”

  “Three choices: We sit here for the rest of our lives, we go back to the cabin or we start walking ahead.”
He took the bottle, got out into the cold wind, and walked around to the tailgate. “Tour’s over, friends. We’re out of gas.” He snapped a sharp glance at Sister. “You satisfied, lady?”

  “We’ve still got legs.”

  “Yeah. So do they.” He nodded toward the two wolves that were standing at the edge of the forest, watching intently. “I think they’d beat us in a footrace, don’t you?”

  “How far is it back to the cabin?” Kevin Ramsey asked, his arms around his shivering wife. “Can we make it before dark?”

  “No.” He regarded Sister again. “Lady, I’m one damned fool for letting you talk me into this. I knew the gas stations were going to be shut down!”

  “Then why’d you come?”

  “Because ... because I wanted to believe. Even though I knew you were wrong.” He sensed motion to his left, saw three more wolves coming through the wrecks on the eastbound lanes. “We were safe in the cabin. I knew there wasn’t anything left!”

  “All the people who passed this way had to be going somewhere,” she insisted. “You would’ve sat in that cabin until your ass grew roots.”

  “We should’ve stayed!” Mona Ramsey wailed. “Oh, Jesus, we’re going to die out here!”

  “Can you stand up?” Sister asked Artie. He nodded. “Do you think you can walk?”

  “Got good shoes,” he rasped. He sat up, pain stitched across his face. “Yeah, I think I can.”

  She helped him to his feet, then lowered the tailgate and just about lifted Artie to the pavement. He clutched at his side and leaned against the truck. Sister slung the rifle’s strap around her shoulder, hefted the duffel bag carefully to the ground and stepped down from the truck bed. She looked Paul Thorson in the face. “We’re going that way.” She motioned toward the hilltop. “Are you coming with us or staying here?”

  Her eyes were the color of steel against her sallow, burn-blotched face. Paul realized that she was either the craziest or toughest mutha he’d ever met. “There’s nothing over there but more nothing.”

  “There’s nothing where we came from.” Sister picked up the duffel bag and, with Artie leaning on her shoulder, started walking up the hill.

  “Give me the rifle,” Paul told her. She stopped. “The rifle,” he repeated. “That won’t do you a damned bit of good. By the time you get it unslung you’ll be hash. Here.” He offered her the bottle. “Take a long swig. Everybody gets a drink before we start. And for God’s sake, keep those blankets around you. Protect your faces as much as you can. Steve, bring the blanket from the front seat. Come on, hurry it up!”

  Sister drank from the bottle, gave Artie a swallow and then returned it and the rifle to Paul. “We keep together,” he told all of them. “We stay in a tight group—just like the wagons when the Indians attacked. Right?” He watched the converging wolves for a moment, lifted the rifle, aimed and shot one through the side. It fell, snapping, and the others leaped upon it, tearing it to pieces. “Okay,” Paul said. “Let’s get on down this damned road.”

  They began walking, the wind whipping around them in vicious crosscurrents. Paul took the lead and Steve Buchanan brought up the rear. They’d gone no more than twenty feet when a wolf lunged out from behind an overturned car and shot across their path. Paul raised his rifle, but the animal had already found cover beyond another hulk. “Watch our backs!” he shouted to Steve.

  The animals were coming in from all sides. Steve counted eight scurrying up from the rear. He eased back the Magnum’s hammer, his heart whacking like a Black Flag drumbeat.

  Another wolf ran in from the left, a streak of motion headed for Kevin Ramsey. Paul whirled and fired; the bullet sang off the pavement, but the animal turned away. Instantly, two more darted in from the right. “Look out!” Sister shouted, and Paul turned in time to shatter a wolf’s leg with one slug. The animal danced crazily across the highway before four others dragged it down. He pumped shots at them and hit two, but the rest fled. “Bullets!” he called, and Sister dug a handful out of the box he’d given her to carry in her duffel bag. He hastily reloaded, but he’d given his gloves to Mona Ramsey, and his sweaty skin was sticking to the rifle’s cold metal. The rest of the bullets went into his coat pocket.

  They were seventy yards from the top of the hill.

  Artie leaned heavily on Sister. He coughed blood and staggered, his legs about to fold. “You can make it,” she said. “Come on, keep moving.”

  “Tired,” he said. He was as hot as a furnace, and he spread warmth to the others gathered around him. “Oh ... I’m ... so ...”

  A wolf’s head lunged from the open window of a burned Oldsm-bile at their side, the jaws snapping at Artie’s face. Sister jerked him aside and the teeth came together with a crack! That was almost as loud as Paul’s rifle shot a second later. The wolf’s head spewed blood and brains and the beast slithered down into the car.

  “... tired,” Artie finished.

  Steve watched two wolves racing in from behind. He lifted the Magnum with both hands, his palms slick on the butt though he was freezing. One of the animals shot off to the side, but the other kept coming. He was just about to fire when it closed within ten feet, snarled and ran behind a wrecked Chevy. He could’ve sworn the snarl had spoken his name.

  There was motion on his left. He started to turn, but he knew he was too late.

  He screamed as a wolf shape hit him, knocking his legs out from under him. The Magnum went off, jumping out of his hands and sliding away across the ice. A large silver-gray wolf had Steve’s right ankle and started dragging him toward the woods. “Help me!” he shouted. “Help me!”

  The old man acted faster than Paul; he took three running steps, lifted the shortwave radio between his hands and smashed it down on the wolf’s skull. The radio burst apart in a confetti spray of wires and transistors, and the wolf released Steve’s ankle. Paul shot it through the ribs, and it, too, was jumped by three more. Steve limped over to get the Magnum, the old man staring horrified at the metallic mess in his hands; then Steve guided him back to the group, and the old man let the last of the radio fall.

  Upwards of fifteen wolves were swirling around them, stopping to ravage the dying or wounded. More were coming from the forest. Holy Jesus! Paul thought as the army of wolves circled them. He took aim at the nearest.

  A form squirmed out from beneath a car hulk on the side away from his rifle. “Paul!” Sister shrieked—and she saw the wolf leap for him before she could do or say anything else.

  He twisted violently around, but he was hit and knocked down under a clawing, snarling weight. The beast’s jaws strained for his throat—and clamped shut on the rifle that Paul had thrown up to guard his face. Sister had to let go of Artie to rush the wolf, and she kicked the thing in the side with all her strength. The wolf released Paul’s rifle, snapped at her foot and tensed to spring at her. She saw its eyes—maddened, defiant, like the eyes of Doyle Halland.

  The wolf leaped.

  There were two cannonlike explosions, and the bullets from Steve’s Magnum almost tore the wolf in half. Sister dodged aside as the wolf sailed past her, its teeth still snapping and its guts trailing behind it.

  She drew a breath, turned toward Artie and saw two wolves hit him at once.

  “No!” she shouted as Artie fell. She bashed one of the animals with her duffel bag and knocked it about eight feet across the pavement. The second chewed on his leg and started dragging him.

  Mona Ramsey screamed and bolted from the group, running past Steve in the direction they’d come. Steve tried to grab her but missed, and Kevin went after her, caught her around the waist and lifted her off her feet just as a wolf sprang from beneath a wreck and trapped her left foot between its teeth. Kevin and the beast pulled Mona in a deadly tug-of-war as the woman screamed and thrashed and more wolves ran out of the woods. Steve tried to fire, but he feared hitting the man or woman. He hesitated, cold sweat freezing to his face, and he was still in a trance when a seventy-pound wolf hit him in the shoul
der like a diesel train. He heard the sound of his shoulder breaking, and he lay writhing in pain as the wolf doubled back and began gnawing at his gun hand.

  The things were everywhere now, darting in and leaping. Paul fired, missed, had to duck a shape that came flying at his head. Sister swung her duffel bag at the wolf that had Artie’s leg, struck its skull and drove it back. Kevin Ramsey had lost the tug-of-war; the wolf wrenched Mona out of his grasp and was attacked by another that wanted the same prize. They fought as Mona frantically tried to crawl away.

  Paul fired and hit a wolf that was about to jump Sister from behind, and then claws were on his shoulders and he was slammed face first into the pavement. The rifle spun away.

  Three wolves converged on Sister and Artie. The old man was kicking wildly at the animal that was attacking Steve’s hand and arm. Sister saw Paul down, his face bleeding and the beast on top of him trying to claw through his leather jacket. She realized they were less than ten yards from the top of the hill, and this was where they were going to die.

  She hauled Artie up like a sack of laundry. The three wolves came in slowly, biding their time. Sister braced herself, ready to swing the duffel bag and kick for all she was worth.

  Over the snarls and shouts, she heard a deep bass growling noise. She glanced toward the hilltop. The sound was coming from the other side. It must be a horde of wolves racing for their share, she realized—or the monster of all wolves awakened from its lair. “Well, come on!” she shouted at the three who were creeping up on her. They hesitated, perhaps puzzled by her defiance, and she felt crazi-ness pulling at her mind again. “Come on, you motherfu—”

  Its engine growling, a yellow snowplow came over the hilltop, its treads crunching over debris. Clinging to the outside of the glass-enclosed cab was a man in a hooded green parka, and he was carrying a rifle with a sniperscope. Following behind the plow was a white Jeep like the kind used by postmen. Its driver zipped the vehicle around the wrecks, and another man with a rifle leaned out the Jeep’s passenger side, shouting and firing into the air. The man riding shotgun on the snowplow carefully aimed and squeezed off a shot. The middle of the three wolves dropped, and the other two turned tail.