Swan Song

by Robert R. McCammon

  At the sight of the apples, there was a collective gasp that went back like a wave over the gathered onlookers. The smell of fresh apples sweetened the air. Sly started laughing, laughing fit to bust, and then he climbed up into the truck’s bed and picked up a shovel that was lying there.

  “I brought you some apples from my tree, Swan!” Sly yelled, his face split by a smile. “Where do you want ’em?”

  She didn’t know what to say. She’d never seen so many apples outside of a supermarket before. They were bright red, and each one about the size of a boy’s fist. She just stood staring at them, and she figured she must look like a dumb fool—but then she knew where she wanted the apples to go. “Out there,” she said, and she pointed to the people crowding around the tailgate.

  Sly nodded. “Yes ma’am,” he said, and then he dug the shovel into the pile of apples and let them fly over the heads of the crowd.

  Apples rained from the sky, and the starving people of Mary’s Rest snatched them as they fell. Apples bounced off their heads, shoulders and backs, but no one cared; there was a roar of voices as other people ran from the alleys and shacks to grab an apple, and they were dancing in the showers of apples, capering and hollering and clapping their hands. Sly Moody’s shovel kept working as more and more people came flooding out of the alleys, but there was no fighting for the precious delicacies. Everyone was too intent on getting an apple, and as Sly Moody kept throwing them into the air the pile hardly seemed to have been dented. Sly grinned deliriously, and he wanted to tell Swan that two days before he’d awakened to find his tree burdened down with hundreds of apples, the branches dragging on the ground. And as soon as those were picked there were already new buds bursting open, and the whole incredibly short cycle was going to be repeated. It was the most amazing, miraculous thing he’d ever seen in his life, and that single tree looked healthy enough to produce hundreds more apples—maybe thousands. He and Carla had already filled their buckets to overflowing.

  Every time Sly’s shovel tossed the apples there was a roar of whooping and laughing. The crowd surged in all directions as apples bounced off them and rolled on the ground. Swan, Sister and Josh were jostled and pushed apart, and suddenly Swan felt herself being carried along with the crowd’s momentum like a reed in a river. “Swan!” she heard Sister shout, but she was already at least thirty feet from Sister, and Josh was doing his best to plow through the people without hurting anyone.

  An apple hit Swan’s shoulder, fell to the ground in front of her and rolled a few feet. She bent to pick it up before she was swept away again, and as her fingers closed on it someone in a pair of scuffed brown boots stepped to within three feet of her.

  She felt cold. A gnawing, bone-aching cold.

  And she knew who it was.

  Her heart hammered. Panic skittered up her spine. The man in the brown boots did not move, and people were not jostling him; they avoided him, as if repelled by the cold. Apples continued to fall to the ground, and the crowd surged, but nobody picked up the apples that lay between Swan and the man who watched her.

  Her first, almost overwhelming impulse was to cry for help from Josh or Sister—but she knew he expected that. As soon as she stood up and opened her mouth, the burning hand would be on her throat.

  She didn’t know exactly what she was going to do, but she was so scared she was about to wet herself. And then she clenched her teeth and slowly, gracefully, stood up with the apple gripped in her hand. She looked at him, because she wanted to see the face of the man with the scarlet eye.

  He was wearing the mask of a skinny black man, wearing jeans and a Boston Celtics T-shirt under an olive-green coat. A red scarf was wrapped around his neck, and his piercing, terrible eyes were pale amber.

  Their stares locked, and Swan saw a silver tooth flash in the front of his mouth when he grinned.

  Sister was too far away. Josh was still fighting the crowd. The man with the scarlet eye stood three feet away, and to Swan it seemed that everyone was swirling around them in nightmarish slow motion, that she and the man stood alone in a trance of time. She knew she must decide her own fate, because there was no one else to help her.

  And she was aware of something else in the eyes of the mask he was wearing, something beyond the cold, lizardlike sheen of evil, something deeper ... and almost human. She remembered seeing the same thing in the eyes of Uncle Tommy the night he’d crushed her flowers, back in the Kansas trailer park seven years ago; it was something wandering and longing, forever locked away from the light and maddened like a tiger in a dark cage. It was dumb arrogance and bastard pride, stupidity and rage stoked to atomic power. But it was something of a little boy, too, wailing and lost.

  Swan knew him. Knew what he’d done and what he would do. And in that moment of knowledge she lifted her arm, reached out her hand toward him—and offered him the apple.

  “I forgive you,” she said.

  His grin went crooked, like the reflection in a mirror abruptly shattered.

  He blinked uncertainly, and in his eyes Swan saw fire and savagery, a core of pain past human suffering and so furious that it almost ripped her own heart to shreds. He was a scream wrapped up in straw, a little, weak, vicious thing gnashing inside a monstrous facade. She saw what he was made of, and she knew him very well.

  “Take it,” she told him, and her heart was beating wildly, but she knew he’d be on her at the first smell of fear. “It’s time.”

  The grin faded. His eyes ticked from her face to the apple and back again like a deadly metronome.

  “Take it,” she urged, the blood pounding so hard in her head she couldn’t hear herself.

  He stared into her eyes—and Swan felt him probe her mind like a freezing ice pick. Little cuts here and there, and then a dark examination of her memories. It was as if every moment of her life was being invaded, picked up and soiled with dirty hands, tossed aside. But she kept her gaze steady and strong, and she would not retreat before him.

  The apple snagged his attention again, and the cold ice pick jabbing within Swan’s mind ceased. She saw his eyes glaze over and his mouth open, and from that mouth crawled a green fly that weakly spun around her head and fell into the mud.

  His hand began to rise. Slowly, very slowly.

  Swan didn’t look at it, but she sensed it rising like the head of a cobra. She was waiting for it to burst into flame. But it did not.

  His fingers strained for the apple.

  And Swan saw that his hand was trembling.

  He almost took it.

  Almost.

  His other hand shot out and grabbed his own wrist, wrenched his arm back and pinned the offending hand underneath his chin. He made a gasping, moaning noise that sounded like wind through the battlements of Hell’s castles, and his eyes almost bulged from his skull. He shrank backward from Swan, his teeth gritted in a snarl, and for an instant he lost control: one eye bleached to blue, and white pigment streaked across the ebony flesh. A second mouth, full of shiny white nubs, gaped like a scar across his right cheekbone.

  In his eyes was hatred and fury and longing for what could never be.

  He turned and fled, and with his first running stride the trance of time broke and the crowd was whirling around Swan again, grabbing up the last of the apples. Josh was just a few feet away, trying to get through to protect her. But it was all right now, she knew. She needed no more protection.

  Someone else plucked the apple from her hand.

  She looked into Robin’s face.

  “I hope this one’s for me,” he said, and he smiled before he bit into it.

  He ran through the muddy alleys of Mary’s Rest with his hand trapped beneath his chin, and where he was going he didn’t know. The hand tensed and shivered, as if trying to fight free with a will of its own. Dogs scattered out of his path, and then he tripped over debris and went down in the mud, got up and staggered on again.

  And if anyone had seen his face, they would have witnessed a thousand transf
ormations.

  Too late! he screamed inwardly. Too late! Too late!

  He’d planned to set her afire, right there in the midst of them, and laugh as he watched her dance. But he’d looked into her eyes and seen forgiveness, and he could not stand up to such a thing. Forgiveness, even for him.

  He’d started to take the apple; for a brief instant, he’d wanted it, like taking the first step along a dark corridor that led back to light. But then the rage and pain had flared within him, and he’d felt the very walls of the universe warp and the wheels of time start to clog and lock. Too late! Too late!

  But he needed no one and nothing to survive, he told himself. He had endured and would endure, and this was his party now. He had always walked alone. Always walked alone. Always walked—

  A scream echoed from the edge of Mary’s Rest, and those who heard it thought it sounded like someone being flayed alive.

  But most of the people were busy collecting apples, shouting and laughing as they ate, and they did not hear.

  71

  A RING OF TORCHES lit the night, burning around the perimeter of a huge parking lot fifteen miles south of the ruins of Lincoln, Nebraska. At the center of the parking lot was a complex of brick buildings connected by sheltered walkways, and with skylights and ventilators set in their flat roofs. In the side of one of the buildings that faced Highway 77 South were rusted metal letters that read GREENBRI R SHOP IN MALL.

  On the western edge of the parking lot, a Jeep’s lights flashed twice. About twenty seconds later, there was an answering double flash of headlights from a pickup truck with an armored windshield, parked near one of the entrances to the mall.

  “There’s the signal,” Roland Croninger said. “Let’s go.”

  Judd Lawry drove the Jeep slowly across the parking lot, aiming at the headlights that grew closer as the pickup truck approached. The tires jarred roughly over bricks, pieces of metal, old bones and other debris that littered the snow-slick concrete. In the seat behind Roland was a soldier with an automatic rifle, and Lawry wore a .38 in a shoulder holster, but Roland was unarmed. He watched the range between the two vehicles steadily decrease. Both the Jeep and the truck were flying white pieces of cloth from their radio antennas.

  “They’ll never let you out of there alive,” Lawry said, almost casually. He glanced quickly over at Captain Croninger’s bandage-wrapped face, cowled by the hood of his coat. “Why’d you volunteer for this?”

  The cowled face slowly swiveled toward Lawry. “I like excitement.”

  “Yeah. Well, you’re about to get it ... sir.” Lawry negotiated the Jeep past the hulk of a burned-out car and tapped the brakes. The pickup truck was about fifty feet away and beginning to slow down. The vehicles stopped thirty feet apart.

  There was no movement from the truck. “We’re waiting!” Roland shouted out his window, the breath steaming through his gnarled lips.

  The seconds ticked past with no response. And then the passenger door opened and a blond man wearing a dark blue parka, brown trousers and boots got out. He stepped a few paces away from the door and leveled a shotgun at the Jeep’s windshield.

  “Steady,” Roland cautioned as Lawry started to reach for his .38.

  Another man got out of the truck and stood beside the first. He was slight and had close-cropped dark hair, and he lifted his hands to show he was unarmed. “Okay!” the one with the shotgun shouted, getting edgy. “Let’s make the trade!”

  Roland was afraid. But he’d learned long before how to push the child Roland away and summon forth the Sir Roland in himself: the adventurer in service to the King, the King’s will be done, amen. His palms were wet inside his black gloves, but he opened the door and got out.

  The soldier with the automatic rifle followed him and stood off to the side a few feet, aiming at the other armed man.

  Roland glanced back at Lawry, making sure the fool wasn’t going to fuck this up, and then he began walking to the truck. The dark-haired man started walking to the Jeep, his eyes darting and nervous. The two figures passed, neither one looking at the other, and the man with the shotgun grabbed Roland’s arm about the same time as the AOE soldier pushed his captive against the Jeep’s side.

  Roland was made to lean against the truck, spread his arms and legs and submit to a search. When it was over, the man spun him around and pressed the snout of the shotgun underneath his chin. “What’s wrong with your face?” the man demanded. “What’s under those bandages?”

  “I was burned pretty bad,” Roland answered. “That’s all.”

  “I don’t like it!” The man had lank, thinning blond hair and fierce blue eyes, like a maniac surfer-boy. “Imperfection is Satan’s work, praise the Savior!”

  “The trade’s been done,” Roland said. The American Allegiance hostage was already being shoved into the Jeep. “The Savior’s waiting for me.”

  The man paused, jittery and uncertain. And then Lawry began to back the Jeep up, clinching the deal. Roland didn’t know if that was smart or stupid.

  “Get in!” The American Allegiance soldier hustled him into the truck’s cab, where Roland sat squeezed between him and the heavy-set, black-bearded driver. The truck veered across the parking lot and turned back toward the mall.

  Through the narrow view slit in the armored windshield, Roland saw the headlights pick out more vehicles protecting the American Allegiance’s fortress: an armored truck with BRINK’S still barely legible on its side, a Jeep with a mounted machine gun in the rear seat, a tractor-trailer rig with dozens of gunports—each showing a rifle or machine gun barrel—cut into the long metal trailer; a postman’s truck with a metal mesh turret on top; more cars and trucks, and then the vehicle that put a lump like a hen’s egg in Roland’s throat—a low-slung, wicked-looking tank covered with multicolored graffiti that said things like THE LOVE BUG and THE SAVIOR LIVES! The tank’s main cannon, Roland noted, was aimed in the general direction of Colonel Macklin’s Airstream trailer, where the King was now incapacitated, suffering from a fever that had struck him down the previous night.

  The truck passed between the tank and another armored car, went over the curb and continued up a ramp for the handicapped, entering the mall through the dark, open space where glass doors had once been. The headlights illuminated a wide central mall area, with stores on either side that had been looted and wrecked a long time before. Soldiers with rifles, pistols and shotguns waved the truck on, and hundreds of lanterns were burning in the central corridor and in the stores, casting a flickering orange glow—like the light at a Halloween party—throughout the building. And Roland saw hundreds of tents set up as well, cramped into every possible space except for a path along which the truck traveled. Roland realized that the whole American Allegiance had set up camp inside the shopping mall, and as the truck turned into a larger, skylighted atrium he heard singing and saw the glare of a fire.

  Perhaps one thousand people were jammed into the atrium, clapping their hands rhythmically, singing and swaying around a large campfire, the smoke whirling up through the skylight’s broken glass. Almost all of them had rifles slung over their shoulders, and Roland knew that one reason the Savior had invited an AOE officer here was to display his weapons and troops. But the reason Roland had accepted the courier’s invitation was to find a weak spot in the Savior’s fortress.

  The truck did not enter the atrium, but continued along another corridor that branched off from it, again lined with looted stores now filled with tents, drums of gasoline and oil, what looked like cases of canned food and bottled water, clothes, weapons and other supplies. The truck stopped in front of a store, and the blond man with the shotgun got out and motioned for Roland to follow. Roland saw the broken fragments of a sign that had once said B. DALTON BOOKSELLERS over the entrance before he walked into the store.

  Three lanterns burned on the cashier’s desk, where both registers had been battered into junk. The walls of the store were scorched, and Roland’s boots crunched over the skele
tons of charred books. Not a volume remained on the shelves or display tables; everything had been piled up and set afire. More lanterns glowed back at the store’s information desk, and the man with the shotgun pushed Roland toward the closed door of the stockroom, where another American Allegiance soldier with an automatic rifle stood at attention. As Roland approached, the soldier lowered his rifle and clicked the safety off. “Halt,” he said. Roland stopped.

  The soldier rapped on the door.

  A short, bald man with narrow, foxlike features peered out. He smiled warmly. “Hello, there! He’s almost ready to see you. He wants to know your name.”

  “Roland Croninger.”

  The man pulled his head back into the room and closed the door again. Then, abruptly, it opened, and the bald man asked, “Are you Jewish?”

  “No.” And then the hood of Roland’s coat was yanked back.

  “Look!” the man with the shotgun said. “Tell him they sent us somebody with a disease!”

  “Oh. Oh, dear.” The other one looked fretfully at Roland’s bandaged face. “What’s wrong with you, Roland?”

  “I was burned, back on the seven—”

  “He’s a fork-tongued liar, Brother Norman!” The shotgun’s barrel pressed against the hard growths on Roland’s skull. “He’s got the Satan Leprosy!”

  Brother Norman frowned and made a clicking sound of sympathy with his lips. “Wait one minute,” he said, and again he disappeared into the stockroom. He returned, approached Roland and said, “Open your mouth, please.”

  “What?”

  The shotgun nudged his skull. “Do it.”

  Roland did. Brother Norman smiled. “That’s good. Now stick out your tongue. My, my, I believe you need a new toothbrush!” He placed a small silver crucifix on Roland’s tongue. “Now keep that inside your mouth for a few seconds, all right? Don’t swallow it!”

  Roland drew the crucifix in on his tongue and closed his mouth. Brother Norman smiled cheerfully. “That crucifix was blessed by the Savior,” he explained. “It’s very special. If you have corruption in you, the crucifix will be black when you open your mouth again. And if it is black, Brother Edward will blow your brains out.”