Swan Song

by Robert R. McCammon

Josh was still standing at the window. “Why’d you leave that one? Why not cut it down with the others?”

  Sly Moody picked up a cup of coffee and took it over to the masked giant. He tried very hard not to stare at the white-splotched hand that accepted the cup. “I’ve lived in this house for near ’bout thirty-five years,” he answered. “That’s a long time to live in one house, on one piece of land, ain’t it? Oh, I used to have a fine cornfield back that way.” He motioned toward the rear of the house. “Used to grow a little tobacco and some pole beans, and every year me and Jeanette would go out in the garden and ...” He trailed off, blinked and glanced over at Carla, who was looking at him with wide, shocked eyes. “I’m sorry, darlin’,” he said. “I mean, me and Carla would go out in the garden and bring back baskets of good vegetables.”

  The woman, seemingly satisfied, stopped stirring the pot and left the room.

  “Jeanette was my first wife,” Sly explained in a hushed voice. “She passed on about two months after it happened. Then one day I was walkin’ up the road to Ray Featherstone’s place—about a mile from here, I guess—and I came across a car that had gone off the road and was half buried in a snowdrift. Well, there was a dead man with a blue face at the wheel, and next to him was a woman who was near ’bout dead. There was a gutted carcass of a French poodle in her lap, and she had a nail file gripped in her hand—and I don’t want to tell you what she did to keep herself from freezin’. Anyway, she was so crazy she didn’t know anything, not even her own name or where she was from. I called her Carla, after the first girl I ever kissed. She just stayed, and now she thinks she’s been livin’ on this farm with me for thirty-five years.” He shook his head, his eyes dark and haunted. “Funny thing, too—that car was a Lincoln Continental, and when I found her she was decked out in diamonds and pearls. I put all that junk away in a shoe box and traded it for sacks of flour and bacon. I figure she didn’t need to ever see ’em again. People came along and salvaged parts off the car, and by and by there was nothin’ left. Better that way.”

  Carla returned with some bowls and began to spoon the stew into them.

  “Bad days,” Sly Moody said softly, staring at the tree. Then his eyes began to clear, and he smiled faintly. “That there’s my apple tree! Yessir! See, I used to have an apple orchard clear across that field. Used to bring in apples by the bushel—but after it happened and the trees died, I started cuttin’ ’em down for firewood. You don’t want to go too far into the forest for firewood, uh-uh! Ray Featherstone froze to death about a hundred yards from his own front door.” He paused for a moment and then sighed heavily. “I planted them apple trees with my own hands. Watched ’em grow, watched ’em burst with fruit. You know what today is?”

  “No,” Josh said.

  “I keep a calendar. One mark for every day. Worn out a lot of pencils, too. Today is the twenty-sixth day of April. Springtime.” He smiled bitterly. “I’ve cut ’em all down but the one and thrown ’em in the fire piece by piece. But damned if I can put an axe to that last one. Damned if I can.”

  “Food’s almost ready,” Carla announced. She had a northern accent, decidedly different from Sly’s languid Missouri drawl. “Come and get it.”

  “Hold on.” Sly looked at Rusty. “I thought you said you were with two friends.”

  “I did. There’s a girl travelin’ with us. She’s ...” He glanced quickly at Josh, then back to Sly. “She’s out in the barn.”

  “A girl? Well, Christ A’mighty, fella! Bring her in here and let her get some hot food!”

  “Uh ... I don’t think—”

  “Go on and get her!” he insisted. “Barn ain’t no place for a girl!”

  “Rusty?” Josh was peering out the window. Night was fast descending, but he could still see the last apple tree and the figure that stood beneath it. “Come here for a minute.”

  Outside, Swan held the blanket around her head and shoulders like a cape and looked up at the branches of the spindly apple tree; Killer ran a couple of rings around the tree and then barked halfheartedly, wanting to get back to the barn. Above Swan’s head, the branches moved like skinny, searching arms.

  She walked forward, her boots sinking through five inches of snow, and placed her bare hand against the tree’s trunk.

  It was cold beneath her fingers. Cold and long dead.

  Just like everything else, she thought. All the trees, the grass, the flowers—everything scorched lifeless by radiation many years ago.

  But it was a pretty tree, she decided. It was dignified, like a monument, and it did not deserve to be surrounded by the ugly stumps of what had been. She knew that the hurting sound in this place must have been a long wail of agony.

  Her hand moved lightly across the wood. Even in death, there was something proud about the tree, something defiant and elemental—a wild spirit, like the heart of a flame that could never be totally extinguished.

  Killer yapped at her feet, urging her to hurry whatever she was doing. Swan said, “All right, I’m rea—”

  She stopped speaking. The wind whirled around her, tugging at her clothes.

  Could it be? she wondered. I’m not dreaming this ... am I?

  Her fingers were tingling. Just barely enough to register through the cold.

  She placed her palm against the wood. A prickling, pins-and-needles sensation coursed through her hand—still faint, but growing, getting stronger.

  Her heart leaped. Life, she realized. There was life there yet, deep in the tree. It had been so long—so very long—since she’d felt the stirring of life beneath her fingers. The feeling was almost new to her again, and she realized how much she’d missed it. Now what felt like a mild electric current seemed to be rising up from the earth through the soles of her boots, moving up her backbone, along her arm and out her hand into the wood. When she drew her hand away, the tingling ceased. She pressed her fingers to the tree again, her heart pounding, and there was a shock so powerful it felt as if fire had shot up her spine.

  Her body trembled. The sensation was steadily getting stronger, almost painful now, her bones aching with the pulse of energy passing through her and into the tree. When she could stand it no longer, she pulled her hand back. Her fingers continued to prickle.

  But she wasn’t finished yet. On an impulse, she extended her index finger and traced letters across the tree trunk: S ... W ... A ... N.

  “Swan!” The voice came from the house, startling her. She turned toward the sound, and as she did the wind ripped at her makeshift cape and flung it back from her shoulders and head.

  Sly Moody was standing between Josh and Rusty, holding a lantern. By its yellow light, he saw that the figure under the apple tree had no face.

  Her head was covered by gray growths that had begun as small black warts, had thickened and spread over the passage of years, had connected with gray tendrils like groping, intertwining vines. The growths had covered her skull like a knotty helmet, had enclosed her facial features and sealed them up except for a small slit at her left eye and a ragged hole over her mouth through which she breathed and ate.

  Behind Sly, Carla screamed. Sly whispered, “Oh ... my Jesus ...”

  The faceless figure grabbed the blanket and shrouded her head, and Josh heard her heartbreaking cry as she raced to the barn.

  49

  DARKNESS FELL OVER THE snow-covered buildings and houses of what had been Broken Bow, Nebraska. Barbed wire surrounded the town, and here and there bits of timber and rags burned in empty oil cans, the wind sending orange sparks spiraling into the sky. On the curving northwest arc of Highway 2, dozens of corpses lay frozen where they’d fallen, and the hulks of charred vehicles still spat flame.

  In the fortress that Broken Bow had been for the last two days, three hundred and seventeen sick and injured men, women and children were trying desperately to keep warm around a huge central bonfire. The houses of Broken Bow were being torn apart and fed to the flames. Another two hundred and sixty-four men and women arm
ed with rifles, pistols, axes, hammers and knives crouched in trenches hastily hacked in the earth along the barbed wire at the western rim of town. Their faces were turned westward, into the shrilling subzero wind that had killed so many. They shivered in their ragged coats, and tonight they dreaded a different kind of death.

  “There!” a man with an ice-crusted bandage around his head shouted. He pointed into the distance. “There! They’re coming!”

  A chorus of shouts and warnings moved along the trench. Rifles and pistols were quickly checked. The trench vibrated with nervous motion, and the breath of human beings whirled through the air like diamond dust.

  They saw the headlights weaving slowly through the carnage on the highway. Then the music drifted to them on the stinging wind. It was carnival music, and as the headlights grew nearer a skinny, hollow-eyed man in a heavy sheepskin coat stood up at the center of the trench and trained a pair of binoculars at the oncoming vehicle. His face was streaked with dark brown keloids.

  He put the binoculars down before the cold could seal the eye-cups to his face. “Hold your fire!” he shouted to the left. “Pass it down!” The message began to go down the line. He looked to the right and shouted the same order, and then he waited, one gloved hand on the Ingram machine gun under his coat.

  The vehicle passed a burning car, and the red glare revealed it to be a truck with the remnants of paint on its sides advertising different flavors of ice cream. Two loudspeakers were mounted atop the truck’s cab, and the windshield had been replaced with a metal plate that had two narrow slits cut for the driver and passengers to see through. The front fender and radiator grille were shielded with metal, and from the armor protruded jagged metal spikes about two feet long. The glass of both headlights was reinforced with heavy tape and covered with wire mesh. On both sides of the truck were gunslits, and atop the truck was a crude sheet-metal turret and the snout of a heavy machine gun.

  The armored Good Humor truck, its modified engine snorting, rolled with chain-covered tires over the carcass of a horse and stopped about fifty yards from the barbed wire. The merry, tape-recorded calliope music continued for perhaps another two minutes—and then there was silence.

  The silence stretched. A man’s voice came through the loudspeakers: “Franklin Hayes! Are you listening, Franklin Hayes?”

  The skinny, weary man in the sheepskin coat narrowed his eyes but said nothing.

  “Franklin Hayes!” the voice continued, with a mocking, lilting note. “You’ve given us a good fight, Franklin Hayes! The Army of Excellence salutes you!”

  “Fuck you,” a middle-aged, shivering woman said softly in the trench beside Hayes. She had a knife at her belt and a pistol in her hand, and a green keloid covered most of her face in the shape of a lily pad.

  “You’re a fine commander, Franklin Hayes! We didn’t think you had the strength to get away from us at Dunning. We thought you’d die on the highway. How many of you are left, Franklin Hayes? Four hundred? Five hundred? And how many are able to keep fighting? Maybe half that number? The Army of Excellence has over four thousand healthy soldiers, Franklin Hayes! Some of those used to suffer for you, but they decided to save their lives and cross over to our side!”

  Someone in the trench to the left fired a rifle, and several other shots followed. Hayes shouted, “Don’t waste your bullets, damn it!” The firing dwindled, then ceased.

  “Your soldiers are nervous, Franklin Hayes!” the voice taunted. “They know they’re about to die.”

  “We’re not soldiers,” Hayes whispered to himself. “You crazy fucker, we’re not soldiers!” How his community of survivors—once numbering over a thousand people trying to rebuild the town of Scottsbluff—had gotten embroiled in this insane “war” he didn’t know. A van driven by a husky red-bearded man had come into Scottsbluff, and out had stepped another, frail-figured man with bandages wrapping his face—all except his eyes, which were covered with goggles. The bandaged man had spoken in a high, young voice, had said that he’d been badly burned a long time ago; he’d asked for water and a place to spend the night, but he wouldn’t let Dr. Gardner even touch his bandages. Hayes himself, as mayor of Scottsbluff, had taken the young man on a walking tour of the structures they were rebuilding. Sometime during the night the two men had driven away, and three days later Scottsbluff was attacked and burned to the ground. The screams of his wife and son still reverberated in Hayes’s mind. Then Hayes had started leading the survivors east to escape the maniacs that pursued them—but the “Army of Excellence” had more trucks, cars, horses, trailers and gasoline, more weapons and bullets and “soldiers,” and the group that followed Hayes had left hundreds of corpses in its wake.

  This was an insane nightmare with no end, Hayes realized. Once he’d been an eminent professor of economics at the University of Wyoming, and now he felt like a trapped rat.

  The headlights of the armored Good Humor truck burned like two malevolent eyes. “The Army of Excellence invites all able-bodied men, women and children who don’t want to suffer anymore to join us,” the amplified voice said. “Just cross the wire and keep walking west, and you’ll be well taken care of—hot food, a warm bed, shelter and protection. Bring your weapons and ammunition with you, but keep the barrels of your guns pointed to the ground. If you are healthy and sound of mind, and if you are unblemished by the mark of Cain, we invite you with love and open arms. You have five minutes to decide.”

  The mark of Cain, Hayes thought grimly. He’d heard that phrase through those damned speakers before, and he knew they meant either the keloids or the growths that covered the faces of many people. They only wanted those “unblemished” and “sound of mind.” But he wondered about the young man with the eye goggles and the bandaged face. Why had he been wearing those bandages, if he himself had not been “blemished” by the “mark of Cain”?

  Whoever was guiding that mob of ravagers and rapists was beyond all humanity. Somehow he—or she—had drilled bloodlust into the brains of over four thousand followers, and now they were killing, looting and burning struggling communities for the sheer thrill of it.

  There was a shout to the right. Two men were struggling over the barbed wire; they got across, snagging their coats and trousers but pulling free, and started running west with their rifles pointed to the ground. “Cowards!” someone shouted. “You dirty cowards!” But the two men did not look back.

  A woman went across, followed by another man. Then a man, a woman and a young boy escaped the trench and fled to the west, all carrying guns and ammunition. Angry shouts and curses were flung at their backs, but Hayes didn’t blame them. None of them bore keloids; why should they stay and be slaughtered?

  “Come home,” the voice intoned over the loudspeakers, like the silken drone of a revival preacher. “Come home to love and open arms. Flee the mark of Cain, and come home ... come home ... come home.”

  More people were going over the wire. They vanished westward into the darkness.

  “Don’t suffer with the unclean! Come home, flee the mark of Cain!”

  A gunshot rang out, and one of the truck’s headlights shattered, but the mesh deflected the slug and the light continued to burn. Still, people climbed over the fence and scurried west.

  “I ain’t goin’ nowhere,” the woman with the lily pad keloid told Hayes. “I’m set and stayin’.”

  The last to go was a teen-age boy with a shotgun, his overcoat pockets stuffed with shells.

  “It’s time, Franklin Hayes!” the voice called.

  He took out the Ingram gun and pushed the safety off.

  “It’s time!” the voice roared—and the roar was joined by other roars, rising together, mixing and mingling like a single, inhuman battle cry. But they were the roars of engines firing, popping and sputtering, blasting to full-throated life. And then the headlights came on—dozens of headlights, hundreds of headlights that curved in an arc on both sides of Highway 2, facing the trench. Hayes realized with numb terror that the othe
r armored trucks, tractor-trailer rigs, and monster machines had been silently pushed almost to the barbed-wire barrier while the Good Humor truck had kept their attention. The headlights speared into the faces of those in the trenches as engines were gunned and chained tires crunched forward across snow and frozen bodies.

  Hayes stood up to yell “Fire!” but the shooting had already started. Sparks of gunfire rippled up and down the trench; bullets whined off metal tire guards, radiator shields and iron turrets. Still the battle wagons came on, almost leisurely, and the Army of Excellence held their fire. Then Hayes screamed, “Use the bombs!” but he was not heard over the tumult. The trench fighters didn’t have to be told to crouch down, pick up one of the three gasoline-filled bottles they’d all been supplied with, touch the rag wicks to the flames from oil barrels and throw the homemade bombs.

  The bottles exploded, sending flaming gasoline shooting across the snow, but in the leaping red light the monsters came on, unscathed, and now some of them were rolling over the barbed wire less than twenty feet from the trench. One bottle scored a direct hit on the viewslit of a Pinto’s armored windshield; it shattered and sprayed fiery gas. The driver tumbled out screaming, his face aflame. He staggered toward the wire, and Franklin Hayes shot him dead with the Ingram gun. The Pinto kept going, tore through the barricade and crushed four people before they could scramble from the trench.

  The vehicles tore the barbed-wire barricade to shreds, and suddenly their crude turrets and gunports erupted with rifle, pistol and machine-gun fire that swept across the trench as Hayes’s followers tried to run. Dozens slithered back in or lay motionless in the dirty, blood-streaked snow. One of the burning oil cans went over, touching off unused bombs that began exploding in the trench. Everywhere was fire and streaking bullets, writhing bodies, screams and a blur of confusion. “Move back!” Franklin Hayes yelled. The defenders fled toward the second barrier about fifty yards behind—a five-foot-high wall of bricks, timbers and frozen bodies of their friends and families stacked up like cordwood.