Swan Song

by Robert R. McCammon

  If it’s lost, he realized, no one else can have it either! The earth’s swallowed it up! It’s gone, and nobody will ever find it again!

  He kept laughing, thinking about how stupid he’d been. The glass ring was gone forever! And Sister herself was the one who’d thrown it away in the mud!

  He felt a lot better now, a lot stronger and more clearheaded. Things had worked out just as they should. It was still his party, because the little bitch belonged to Macklin, the human hand had destroyed Mary’s Rest and Sister had consigned her treasure to the black, unforgiving dirt—where it would lie forever next to a cowboy’s charred bones.

  He stood up, satisfied that the grave was lost, and began striding across the field to where his driver waited with the Jeep. He turned back for one last look, and his teeth glinted white against his mud-smeared face. It would take a feat of magic, he mused, to make that damned glass ring reappear—and he was the only magician he knew.

  Now we march, he thought. We take the little bitch with us, and we take Sister, that big nigger and the boy, too, to keep her in line. The rest of the dogs can live in these miserable shacks until they rot—which won’t be very long.

  Now we go to West Virginia and Warwick Mountain. To find God. He smiled, and the driver who was waiting just ahead saw that awful, inhuman grimace and shuddered. The man with the scarlet eye was very eager to meet “God,” very eager indeed. After that, the little bitch would go to her prison farm, and then ... who knows?

  He liked being a five-star general. It was a task he seemed particularly well suited for, and as he swept his gaze across the plain of heaped-up corpses he felt like the king of all he surveyed, and very much at home.

  88

  AT THE CRASH OF the dinner gong, Josh started salivating like an animal.

  The guard was beating on the truck’s rear door with his rifle butt, signaling the three prisoners to move to the far end of their cell-on-wheels. Josh, Robin and Brother Timothy knew that noise very well. Robin had held out the longest, refusing to eat any of the watery gruel for four days—until Josh had held him down and force-fed him, and afterward, when Robin wanted to fight, Josh had knocked him flat and told him he was going to live whether he liked it or not.

  “What for?” Robin had asked, aching to fight but too smart to charge the black giant again. “They’re just going to kill us anyway!”

  “I don’t really give a crap whether you live or not, you pissant punk!” Josh had told him, trying to make the boy mad enough to stay alive. “If you’d been a man, you would’ve protected Swan! But they’re not going to kill us today. Otherwise they wouldn’t have wasted the food. And what about Swan? You’re just going to give up and leave her to the wolves?”

  “Man, you’re a jive fool! She’s probably already dead, and Sister, too!”

  “No way. They’re keeping Swan and Sister alive—and us, too. So from now on you’ll eat, or by God, I’ll shove your face in that bowl and make you suck it up your nostrils! Understand?”

  “Big man,” Robin had sneered, crawling away into his customary corner and wrapping his dirty, threadbare brown blanket around himself. But from that day on he’d eaten his food without hesitation.

  The truck’s metal rear door was perforated with thirty-seven small round holes—both Josh and Robin had counted them many times, and they had devised a mental connect-the-dots-type game with them—which let in dim gray light and air. They were useful peepholes, too, through which to see what was going on in the camp and the landscape they were passing over. But now the door was unbolted, and it slid upward on its rollers. The guard with the rifle—who Robin less-than-affectionately called Sergeant Shitpants—barked, “Buckets out!”

  Two more guards stood by with guns aimed and ready as first Josh, then Robin and Brother Timothy brought their waste buckets out.

  “Step down!” Sergeant Shitpants ordered. “Single file! Move it!”

  Josh squinted in the hazy light of morning. The camp was gearing up to move again; tents were being packed up, vehicles being checked over and gassed up from drums on the back of supply trucks. Josh had noted that the number of gas drums was dwindling fast, and the Army of Excellence had left many broken-down vehicles behind. He looked around at the land as he walked about ten yards away from the truck and dumped his bucket into a ravine. Dense thicket and leafless woods lay on the far side of the ravine, and in the misty distance were snow-covered, hard-edged mountains. The highway they’d been traveling on led up into those mountains, but Josh didn’t know exactly where they were. Time was jumbled and confused; he thought it had been two weeks since they’d left Mary’s Rest, but he wasn’t even sure of that. Maybe it was more like three weeks. Anyway, by this time they’d left Missouri far behind, he figured.

  And Glory and Aaron as well. When the soldiers had come to take him and Robin out of the chicken coop, Josh had had time only to pull Glory against him and say, “I’ll be back.” Her eyes had looked right through him. “Listen to me!” he’d said, shaking her—and finally she’d let her mind return and had focused on the handsome black man who stood before her. “I’ll be back. You just be strong, you hear? And take care of the boy as best you can.”

  “You won’t be back. No. You won’t.”

  “I will! I haven’t seen you in that spangled dress yet. That’s worth coming back for, isn’t it?”

  Glory had gently touched his face, and Josh had seen that she wanted desperately to believe. And then one of the soldiers had thrust a rifle barrel at his injured ribs, and Josh had almost doubled up with agony—but he’d forced himself to remain standing and to walk out of the chicken coop with dignity.

  When the trucks, armored cars and trailers of the Army of Excellence had finally rolled out of Mary’s Rest, about forty people followed on foot for a while, calling Swan’s name, sobbing and wailing. The soldiers had used them for target practice until the last fifteen or so turned back.

  “Returrrrn buckets!” Sergeant Shitpants thundered after Robin and Brother Timothy had emptied theirs. The three prisoners took their buckets back into the truck, and the sarge commanded, “Bowls ready!”

  They brought out the small wooden bowls they’d all been given, and about that time a cast-iron pot arrived from the field kitchen. A bland soup made of canned tomato paste and fortified with crumbled saltines was ladled into the bowls; the menu was usually the same, delivered twice a day, except sometimes the soup had slivers of salt pork or Spam floating in it.

  “Cups out!”

  The prisoners offered their tin cups as another soldier poured water from a canteen. The liquid was brackish and oily—certainly not water from the spring. This was water from melted snow, because it left a film in the mouth, made the back of the throat sore and caused ulcers on Josh’s gums. He knew there were big wooden kegs of springwater on the supply trucks, and he knew also that none of them would get a drop of it.

  “Back up!” Sergeant Shitpants ordered, and as the prisoners obeyed the metal door was pulled down and bolted shut, and feeding time was over.

  Inside the truck, each found his own space to eat in—Robin in his corner, Brother Timothy in another, and Josh toward the center. When he was finished, Josh pulled his tattered blanket around his shoulders, because the unlined metal interior of the truck’s storage space always stayed frigid; then he stretched out to sleep again. Robin got up, pacing back and forth to burn off nervous energy.

  “Better save it,” Josh said, hoarse from the contaminated water.

  “For what? Oh, yeah, I guess we’re going to make our break today, huh? Sure! I’d really better save it!” He felt sluggish and weak, and his head ached so much he could hardly think. He knew it was a reaction to the water after his system had been cleaned out by the spring in Mary’s Rest. But all he could do to keep from going crazy was move around.

  “Forget trying to escape,” Josh told him, for about the fiftieth time. “We’ve got to stay near Swan.”

  “We haven’t seen her sinc
e they threw us in here! Man, there’s no telling what the bastards have done to her! I say we’ve got to get out—and then we can help Swan get away!”

  “It’s a big camp. Even if we could get out—which we couldn’t—how would we find her? No, it’s best to stay right here, lay low and see what they’ve got planned for us.”

  “Lay low?” Robin laughed incredulously. “If we lay any lower we’ll have dirt on our eyelids! I know what they’ve got planned! They’re going to keep us in here till we rot, or shoot us on the side of the road somewhere!” His head pounded fiercely, and he had to kneel down and press his palms against his temples until the pain had passed. “We’re dead,” he rasped finally. “We just don’t know it yet.”

  Brother Timothy slurped at his bowl. He licked the last of it from the sides; he had a patchy dark beard now, and his skin was as white as the lightning streak that marked his oily black hair. “I’ve seen her,” he said matter-of-factly—the first utterance he’d made in three days. Both Josh and Robin were shocked silent. Brother Timothy lifted his head; one lens of his spectacles was cracked, and electrical tape held the glasses together on the bridge of his nose. “Swan,” he said. “I’ve seen her.”

  Josh sat up. “Where? Where’d you see her?”

  “Out there. Walking around one of the trailers. That other woman—Sister—was there, too. The guards were right behind them. I guess that was their exercise break.” He picked up the tin cup and sipped the water as if it were liquid gold. “I saw them ... day before yesterday, I think. Yes. Day before yesterday. When I went out to read the maps.”

  Josh and Robin moved around him, watching him with new interest. Lately the soldiers had been coming for Brother Timothy and taking him to Colonel Macklin’s Command Center, where old maps of Kentucky and West Virginia were tacked to the wall. Brother Timothy answered questions from Captain Croninger, Macklin and the man who called himself Friend; he’d shown them the Warwick Mountain Ski Resort on the map, over in Pocahontas County, just west of the Virginia line and the dark crags of the Alleghenies. But that wasn’t the place he’d found God, he’d told them; the ski resort lay in the foothills on the eastern side of Warwick Mountain, and God lived in the heights on the opposite side, way up where the coal mines were.

  The best that Josh could determine from Brother Timothy’s rambling, often incoherent tale was that he’d been in a van with either his family or another group of survivors, heading west from somewhere in Virginia. Someone was after them; Brother Timothy said their pursuers rode motorcycles and had chased them for fifty miles. The van either ran off the road or had a blowout, but they’d made it on foot to the shuttered Warwick Mountain Hotel—and there the motorcycle riders had trapped them, attacking with machetes, butcher knives and meat cleavers.

  Brother Timothy thought he recalled lying in a snowdrift on his belly. Blood was all over his face, and he could hear thin, agonized screaming. Soon the screaming stopped, and smoke began to curl from the hotel’s stone chimney. He ran and kept going crosscountry through the woods; then he had found a cave large enough to squeeze his body into during the long, freezing night. And the next day he’d come upon God, who had sheltered him until the motorcycle riders stopped searching for him and went away.

  “Well, what about her?” Robin prompted irritably. “Was she all right?”

  “Who?”

  “Swan! Was she okay?”

  “Oh, yes. She seemed to be fine. A little thin, maybe. Otherwise A-OK.” He sipped water and ran it over his tongue. “That’s a word God taught me.”

  “Look, you crazy fool!” Robin grasped the collar of his grimy coat. “What part of the camp did you see her in?”

  “I know where they’re keeping her. In Sheila Fontana’s trailer, over in the RL district.”

  “RL? What’s that?” Josh asked.

  “Red Light, I think. Where the whores are.”

  Josh pushed aside the first thought that came at him: that they were using Swan as a prostitute. But no, no; they wouldn’t do that. Macklin wanted to use Swan’s power to grow crops for his army, and he wasn’t going to risk her getting hurt or infected with disease. And Josh pitied the fool who tried to force himself on Sister.

  “You don’t ... think ...” Robin’s voice trailed off. He felt breathless and sick, as if he’d been kicked in the stomach, and if he saw any indication that Josh thought it might be true, he knew he was going to lose his mind in that instant.

  “No,” Josh told him. “That’s not why she’s here.”

  Robin believed it. Or wanted to, very badly. He let go of Brother Timothy’s coat and crawled away, sitting with his back against the metal wall and his knees drawn up to his chest.

  “Who’s Sheila Fontana?” Josh asked. “A prostitute?”

  Brother Timothy nodded and returned to slowly sipping his water. “She’s watching them for Colonel Macklin.”

  Josh looked around their makeshift prison and felt the walls pressing in on him. He was sick of the cold metal, sick of the smell, sick of those thirty-seven holes in the door. “Damn! Isn’t there any way out of here?”

  “Yes,” Brother Timothy replied.

  That got Robin’s attention again and brought him back from his memory of awakening Swan with a kiss.

  Brother Timothy held up his tin cup. He ran a finger along a small, sharp edge that had broken loose from the handle. “This is the way out,” he said softly. “You can use it on your throat, if you like.” He drank the rest of the water and offered the cup to Josh.

  “No, thanks. But don’t let me stop you.”

  Brother Timothy smiled slightly. He put the cup aside. “I would, if I were without hope. But I’m not.”

  “How about spreading the cheer around, then?” Robin said.

  “I’m leading them to God.”

  Robin scowled. “Excuse me if I don’t jump right up and dance.”

  “You would, if you knew what I do.”

  “We’re listening,” Josh prompted.

  Brother Timothy was silent. Josh thought he was going to refuse to answer, and then the man leaned his back against the wall and said quietly, “God told me that the prayer for the final hour will bring down the talons of Heaven upon the heads of the wicked. In the final hour, all evil will be swept away, and the world will be washed clean again. God told me ... he was going to wait on Warwick Mountain.”

  “Wait for what?” Robin asked.

  “To see who won,” Brother Timothy explained. “Good or Evil. And when I lead Colonel Macklin’s Army of Excellence up Warwick Mountain, God will see for himself who the victors are. But he won’t permit Evil to conquer. Oh, no.” He shook his head, his eyes dreamy and blissful. “He’ll see that it’s the final hour, and he’ll pray to the machine that calls down the talons of Heaven.” He looked at Josh. “You understand?”

  “No. What machine?”

  “The one that speaks and thinks for hour after hour, day after day. You’ve never seen such a machine as that. God’s army built it, a long time ago. And God knows how to use it. You wait, and you’ll see.”

  “God doesn’t really live on top of a mountain!” Robin said. “If there’s anybody up there, it’s just a crazy man who thinks he’s God!”

  Brother Timothy’s head slowly swiveled toward Robin. His face was tight, his eyes steady. “You’ll see. At the final hour, you’ll see. Because the world will be washed clean again, and all that is will be no more. The last of the Good must die with the Evil. Must die, so the world can be reborn. You must die. And you.” He looked at Josh. “And me. And even Swan.”

  “Sure!” Robin scoffed, but the man’s sincerity gave him the creeps. “I’d hate to be in your skin when old Colonel Mack finds out you’ve been jiving him along.”

  “Soon, young man,” Brother Timothy told him. “Very soon. We’re on Highway 60 right now, and yesterday we passed through Charleston.” There hadn’t been much left, only burned-out and empty buildings, a brackish contaminated river, and maybe tw
o hundred people living in wood-and-clay hovels. The Army of Excellence had promptly taken all their guns, ammunition and clothing and their meager supply of food. The AOE had raided and destroyed five settlements since leaving Mary’s Rest; none of them had given even the slightest resistance. “We’ll keep following this highway to the junction of 219,” Brother Timothy continued, “and then we’ll turn north. There’ll be a ghost town called Slatyfork within forty or fifty miles. I hid there for a while after I left God. I hoped he’d call me back, but he didn’t. A road goes east from that town, up the side of Warwick Mountain. And that’s where we’ll find God waiting.” His eyes shone. “Oh, yes! I know the way very well, because I always hoped to come back to him. My advice to both of you is to prepare yourselves for the final hour—and to pray for your souls.”

  He crawled away into his corner, and for a long time afterward Josh and Robin could hear him muttering and praying in a high, singsong voice.

  Robin shook his head and lay down on his side to think.

  Brother Timothy had left his tin cup behind. Josh picked it up and sat thoughtfully for a moment. Then he ran his finger along the handle’s sharp edge.

  It drew a fine line of blood.

  89

  “PLEASE,” SHEILA FONTANA SAID,touching Sister’s shoulder. “Can I ... hold it again?”

  Sister was sitting on a mattress on the floor, drinking the vile soup that the guards had brought in a few minutes before. She looked over at Swan, who sat nearby with her own bowl of watery breakfast, and then she lifted the thin blanket that was draped across the lower end of the mattress; underneath, the mattress had been slashed open and some of the stuffing pulled out. Sister reached up into the hole, her fingers searching.

  She withdrew the battered leather satchel and offered it to Sheila.

  The other woman’s eyes lit up, and she sat down on the floor the way children had once done on Christmas morning.