Swan Song

by Robert R. McCammon

  “I was always good at growing plants and flowers,” Swan continued. “When I wanted a sick plant to get better, I worked the dirt with my hands, and more often than not the brown leaves fell off and grew back green. But I’ve never tried to heal a tree before. I mean ... it was one thing to grow a garden, but trees take care of themselves.” She angled her head so she could see Josh. “What if I could grow the orchards and crops back again? What if Mr. Moody was right, and there’s something in me that could wake things up and start them growing?”

  “I don’t know,” Josh said. “I guess that would make you a pretty popular lady. But like I say, one tree isn’t an orchard.” He shifted uncomfortably on the hard board beneath him. Talking about this made him jittery. Protect the child, he thought. If Swan could indeed spark life from the dead earth, then could that awesome power be the reason for PawPaw’s commandment?

  In the distance, Killer barked again. Swan tensed; the sound was different, faster and higher pitched. There was a warning in that bark. “Stop the wagon,” she said.

  “Huh?”

  “Stop the wagon.”

  The strength of her voice made Josh pull Mule’s reins.

  Rusty stopped, too, the lower half of his face shielded with a woolen muffler under the cowboy hat. “Hey! What’re we stoppin’ for?”

  Swan listened to Killer’s barking, the noise floating around a bend in the road ahead. Mule shifted in his traces, lifted his head to sniff the air and made a deep grumbling sound. Another warning, Swan thought; Mule was smelling the same danger Killer had already sensed. She tilted her head to see the road. Everything looked okay, but the vision blurred in and out in her remaining eye and she knew its sight was rapidly failing.

  “What is it?” Josh asked.

  “I don’t know. Whatever it is, Killer doesn’t like it.”

  “Could be the town’s just around the bend!” Rusty said. “I’ll mosey ahead and find out!” His hands thrust into his coat pockets, he started walking toward the bend in the road. Killer was still barking frantically.

  “Rusty! Wait!” Swan called, but her voice was so garbled he didn’t understand her and kept going at a brisk pace.

  Josh realized that Rusty wasn’t carrying a gun, and no telling what was around that bend. “Rusty!” he shouted, but the other man was already taking the curve. “Oh, shit!” Josh unzipped the wagon’s flap, then opened the shoe box with the .38 in it and hastily loaded it. He could hear Killer’s yap-yap-yapping echoing through the woods, and he knew that Rusty would find out what Killer had seen in just a matter of seconds.

  Around the bend, Rusty was faced with nothing but more road and woods. Killer was standing in the center of the road about thirty feet away, barking wildly at something off to the right. The terrier’s coat was bristling.

  “What the hell’s bit your butt?” Rusty asked, and Killer ran between his legs, almost tripping him. “Crazy fool dog!” He reached down to pick the terrier up—and that was when he smelled it.

  A sharp, rank odor.

  He recognized it. The heady spoor of a wild animal.

  There was a nerve-shattering shriek, almost in his ear, and a gray form shot from the forest’s edge. He didn’t see what it was, but he flung an arm up over his face to protect his eyes. The animal slammed into his shoulder, and for an instant Rusty felt entangled by live wires and thorns. He staggered back, trying to cry out, but the breath had been knocked from his lungs. His hat spun away, spattered with blood, and he sank to his knees.

  Dazed, he saw what had hit him.

  Crouched about six feet away, its spine arched, was a bobcat almost the size of a calf. The thing’s extended claws looked like hooked daggers, but what shocked Rusty almost senseless was the sight of the monster’s two heads.

  While one green-eyed face shrieked with a noise like razor blades on glass, the second bared its fangs and hissed like a radiator about to blow.

  Rusty tried to crawl away. His body refused. Something was wrong with his right arm, and blood was streaming down the right side of his face. Bleedin’! he thought. I’m bleedin’ bad! Oh, Jesus, I’m—

  The bobcat came at him like a spring unwinding, its claws and double set of fangs ready to rip him to pieces.

  But it was hit in mid-air by another form, and Killer almost took one of the monster’s ears off. They landed in a clawing, shrieking fury, hair and blood flying. But the battle was over in another instant as the massive bobcat twisted Killer on his back and one of the fanged mouths tore the terrier’s throat open.

  Rusty tried to get to his feet, staggered and fell again. The bobcat turned toward him. One set of fangs snapped at him while the other head sniffed the air. Rusty got a booted foot up in the air to kick at the monster when it attacked. The bobcat crouched back on its hind legs. Come on! Rusty thought. Get it over with, you two-headed bas—

  He heard the crack! of a pistol, and snow jumped about six feet behind the bobcat. The monster whirled around, and Rusty saw Josh running toward him. Josh stopped, took aim again and fired. The bullet went wild again, and now the bobcat began to turn one way and then the other, as if its two brains couldn’t agree on which way to run. The heads snapped at each other, straining at the neck.

  Josh planted his feet, aimed with his single eye and squeezed the trigger.

  A hole plowed through the bobcat’s side, and one head made a shrill wailing while the second growled at Josh in defiance. He fired again and missed, but he hit with his next two shots. The monster trembled, loped toward the woods, turned and streaked again toward Rusty. The eyes of one head had rolled back to show the whites, but the other was still alive, and its fangs were bared to plunge into Rusty’s throat.

  He heard himself screaming as the monster advanced, but less than three feet from him the bobcat shuddered and its legs gave way. It fell to the road, its living head snapping at the air.

  Rusty scrambled away from the thing, and then a terrible wave of weakness crashed over him. He lay where he was as Josh ran toward him.

  Kneeling beside Rusty, Josh saw that the right side of his face had been clawed open from hairline to jaw, and in the torn sleeve of his right shoulder was mangled tissue.

  “Bought the farm, Josh.” Rusty summoned a weak smile. “Sure did, didn’t I?”

  “Hang on.” Josh tucked the pistol under one arm and lifted Rusty off the ground, slinging him over his back in a fireman’s carry. Swan was approaching, trying to run but being thrown off balance by the weight of her head. A few feet away, the mutant bobcat’s fangs came together like the crack of a steel trap; the body shook, and then its eyes rolled back like ghastly green marbles. Josh walked past the bobcat to Killer and the terrier’s pink tongue emerged from its bloody mouth to lick Josh’s boot.

  “What happened?” Swan called frantically. “What is it?”

  Killer made an effort to rise to all fours when he heard Swan’s voice, but his body was beyond control. His head was hanging limply, and as Killer toppled back on his side Josh could see that the dog’s eyes were already glazing over.

  “Josh?” Swan called. Her hands were up in front of her, because she could hardly see where she was going. “Talk to me, damn it!”

  Killer gave one quick gasp, and then he was gone.

  Josh stepped between Swan and the dog. “Rusty’s been hurt,” he said. “It was a bobcat. We’ve got to get him to town in a hurry!” He grasped her arm and pulled her with him before she could see the dead terrier.

  Josh gently laid Rusty in the back of the wagon and covered him with the red blanket. Rusty was shivering and only half conscious. Josh told Swan to stay with him, and then he went forward and took Mule’s reins. “Giddap!” he shouted. The old horse, whether surprised by the command or by the unaccustomed urgency of the reins, snorted steam through his nostrils and bounded forward, pulling with new-found strength.

  Swan drew the tent’s flap open. “What about Killer? We can’t just leave him!”

  He couldn’t yet brin
g himself to tell her that the terrier was dead. “Don’t you worry,” he said. “He’ll find his way.” He snapped the reins against Mule’s haunches. “Giddap now, Mule! Go, boy!”

  The wagon rounded the bend, its wheels passing on either side of Killer, and Mule’s hooves threw up a spray of snow as the horse raced toward Mary’s Rest.

  58

  THE ROAD SPOOLED OUT another mile before the woods gave way to bleak, rolling land that might have once been plowed hillsides. Now it was a snow-covered waste, interrupted by black trees twisted into shapes both agonized and surrealistic. But there was a town, of sorts: Clustered along both sides of the road were maybe three hundred weather-beaten clapboard shacks. Josh thought that seven years ago a sight like this would’ve meant he was entering a ghetto, but now he was overjoyed to the point of tears. Muddy alleys cut between the shacks, and smoke curled into the bitter air from stovepipe chimneys. Lanterns glowed behind windows insulated with yellowed newspapers and magazine pages. Skinny dogs howled and barked around Mule’s legs as Josh drew the wagon up amid the shacks. Across the road and up a ways was a charred pile of timbers where one of the buildings of Mary’s Rest had burned to the ground; the fire had been some time ago, because new snow had collected in the ruins.

  “Hey!” Josh shouted. “Somebody help us!”

  A few thin children in ragged coats came out from the alleys to see what was going on. “Is there a doctor around here?” Josh asked them, but they scattered back into the alleys. The door of a nearby shack opened, and a black-bearded face peered cautiously out. “We need a doctor!” Josh demanded. The bearded man shook his head and shut the door.

  Josh urged Mule deeper into the shantytown. He kept shouting for a doctor, and a few people opened their doors and watched him pass, but none offered assistance. Further on, a pack of dogs that had been tearing at the remains of an animal in the mud snarled and snapped at Mule, but the old horse kept his nerve and held steady. From a doorway lurched an emaciated old man in rags, his face blotched with red keloids. “No room here! No food! We don’t want no strangers here!” he raved, striking the wagon’s side with a gnarled stick. He was still babbling as they drew away.

  Josh had seen a lot of wretched places before, but this was the worst. It occurred to him that this was a town of strangers where nobody gave a shit about who lived or died in the next hovel. There was a brooding sense of defeat and fatal depression here, and even the air smelled of rank decay. If Rusty hadn’t been so badly hurt, Josh would have kept the wagon going right through the ulcer of Mary’s Rest and out where the air smelled halfway decent again.

  A figure with a malformed head stumbled along the roadside, and Josh recognized the same disease that both he and Swan had. He called to the person, but whoever it was—male or female—turned and ran down an alley out of sight. Lying on the ground a few yards away was a dead man, stripped naked, his ribs showing and his teeth bared in what might have been a grin of escape. A few dogs were sniffing around him, but they had not yet begun feasting.

  And then Mule stopped as if he’d run into a brick wall, neighed shrilly and almost reared. “Whoa! Settle down, now!” Josh shouted, having to fight the horse for control.

  He saw that someone was in the road in front of them. The figure was wearing a faded denim jacket and a green cap and was sitting in a child’s red wagon. The figure had no legs, the trousers rolled up and empty below the thighs. “Hey!” Josh called. “Is there a doctor in this town?”

  The face turned slowly toward him. It was a man with a scraggly light brown beard and vague, tormented eyes. “We need a doctor!” Josh said. “Can you help us?”

  Josh thought the man might’ve smiled, but he wasn’t sure. The man said, “Welcome!”

  “A doctor! Can’t you understand me?”

  “Welcome!” the man repeated, and he laughed, and Josh realized he was out of his mind.

  The man reached out, plunged his hands into the mud and began to pull himself and the wagon across the road. “Welcome!” he shouted as he rolled away into an alley.

  Josh shivered, and not just from the cold. That man’s eyes ... they were the most awful eyes Josh had ever looked into. He got Mule settled down and moving forward again.

  He continued to shout for help. An occasional face looked out from a doorway and then drew quickly back. Rusty’s going to die, Josh feared. He’s going to bleed to death, and not a single bastard in this hellhole will raise a finger to save him!

  Yellow smoke drifted across the road, the wagon’s tires moving through puddles of human waste. “Somebody help us!” Josh’s voice was giving out. “Please ... for God’s sake ... somebody help us!”

  “Lawd! What’s all the yellin’ about?”

  Startled, Josh looked toward the voice. Standing in the doorway of a decrepit shack was a black woman with long, iron-gray hair. She wore a coat that had been stitched from a hundred different scraps of cloth.

  “I need to find a doctor! Can you help me?”

  “What’s wrong with you?” Her eyes, the color of copper pennies, narrowed. “Typhoid? The dysentery?”

  “No. My friend’s been hurt. He’s in the back.”

  “Ain’t no doctor in Mary’s Rest. Doctor died of typhoid. Ain’t nobody can help you.”

  “He’s bleeding bad! Isn’t there someplace I can take him?”

  “You can take him to the Pit,” she suggested. She had a sharp-featured, regal face. “’Bout a mile or so down the road. It’s where all the bodies go.” The dark face of a boy about seven or eight years old peeked through the doorway at her side, and she rested a hand on his shoulder. “Ain’t noplace to take him but there.”

  “Rusty’s not dead, lady!” Josh snapped. “But he’s sure going to be if I don’t find some help for him!” He flicked Mule’s reins.

  The black woman let him get a few yards further down the road, and then she said, “Hold on!”

  Josh reined Mule in.

  The woman walked down the cinder block steps in front of her shack and approached the rear of the wagon while the little boy nervously watched. “Open this thing up!” she said—and suddenly the rear flap was unzipped, and she was face to face with Swan. The woman stepped back a pace, then took a deep breath, summoned her courage again and looked into the wagon at the bloody white man lying under a red blanket. The white man wasn’t moving. “He still alive?” she asked the faceless figure.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Swan replied. “But he’s not breathing very good.”

  She could make out the “yes,” but nothing more. “What happened?”

  “Bobcat got him,” Josh said, coming around to the back of the wagon. He was shaking so much he could hardly stand. The woman took a long, hard look at him with her piercing copper-colored eyes. “Damned thing had two heads.”

  “Yeah. Lots of ’em out in the woods like that. Kill you for sure.” She glanced toward the house, then back at Rusty. He made a soft moaning noise, and she could see the terrible wound on the side of his face. She let the breath leak out between her clenched teeth. “Well, bring him on inside, then.”

  “Can you help him?”

  “We’ll find out.” She started walking toward the shack and turned back to say, “I’m a seamstress. Pretty good with a needle and catgut. Bring him on.”

  The shack was as grim inside as it was out, but the woman had two lanterns lit, and on the walls were hung bright pieces of cloth. At the center of the front room stood a makeshift stove constructed from parts of a washing machine, a refrigerator and various pieces of what might have been a truck or car. A few scraps of wood burned behind a grate that was once a car’s radiator grille, and the stove only provided heat within a two-or three-foot radius. Smoke leaked through the funnel that went up into the roof, giving the shack’s interior a yellow haze. The woman’s furniture—a table and two chairs—were crudely sawn from worm-eaten pinewood. Old newspapers covered the windows, and the wind piped through cracks in the walls. On the pinewood table were sn
ippets of cloth, scissors, needles and the like, and a basket held more pieces of cloth in a variety of colors and patterns.

  “It ain’t much,” she said with a shrug, “but it’s better than some has. Bring him in here.” She motioned Josh into a second, smaller room, where there was an iron-framed cot and a mattress stuffed with newspapers and rags. On the floor next to the cot was a little arrangement of rags, a small patchwork pillow and a thin blanket in which, Josh presumed, the little boy slept. In the room there were no windows, but a lantern burned with a shiny piece of tin behind it to reflect the light. An oil painting of a black Jesus on a hillside surrounded by sheep hung on a wall.

  “Lay him down,” the woman said. “Not on my bed, fool. On the floor.”

  Josh put Rusty down with his head cradled by the patchwork pillow.

  “Get that jacket and sweater off him so I can see if he’s still got any meat left on that arm.”

  Josh did as she said while Swan stood in the doorway with her head tilted way to one side so she could see. The little boy stood on the other side of the room, staring at Swan.

  The woman picked up the lantern and put it on the floor next to Rusty. She whistled softly. “’Bout scraped him to the bone. Aaron, you go bring the other lamps in here. Then you fetch me the long bone needle, the ball of catgut and a sharp pair of scissors. Hurry on, now!”

  “Yes, Mama,” Aaron said, and he darted past Swan.

  “What’s your friend’s name?”

  “Rusty.”

  “He’s in a bad way. Don’t know if I can stitch him up, but I’ll do my best. Ain’t got nothin’ but snow water to clean those wounds with, and you sure as hell don’t want that filthy shit in an open—” She stopped, looking at Josh’s mottled hands as he took off his gloves. “You black or white?” she asked.

  “Does it matter anymore?”

  “Naw. Don’t reckon it does.” Aaron brought the two lanterns, and she arranged them near Rusty’s head while he went out again to get the other things she needed. “You got a name?”