1987 - Swan Song v4

by Robert McCammon

  “Does everybody get a uniform, Dad?” Roland asked.

  “No, I’m afraid not. Just the men who work here wear uniforms.”

  “I didn’t even see them,” Elise said, still nervous. “I just looked up and there they were. They were pointing those guns right at us! What if one had gone off?”

  “These people are professionals, hon. They wouldn’t be here if they didn’t know what they were doing, and I’m sure all of them know how to handle guns. That just shows you how secure we’re going to be for the next two weeks. Nobody can get up here who doesn’t belong. Right?”

  “Right!” Roland said. He had experienced a thrill of excitement when he’d looked down the barrels of those two Ingram guns; if they’d wanted to, he thought, they could’ve blown us all away with a single burst. One squeeze of the trigger and zap! The feeling left him amazingly invigorated, as if cold water had been splashed in his face. That was good, he thought. Very good. One of the qualities of a King’s Knight was to take danger in stride.

  “There’s the stop sign,” Phil told them as the headlights hit it, dead ahead. The large sign was affixed to a wall of rough, jagged rock that ended the mountain road. Around them were only dark woods and the rise of more rocky walls; there was no sign of the place they had come from Flagstaff to find.

  “How do you get inside?” Elise asked.

  “You’ll see. This was one of the neatest things they showed me.” Phil had been here in April, after he’d read an advertisement for Earth House in Soldier of Fortune magazine. He slowly guided the Roamer forward until its front tires sank into two grooves in the earth and triggered a pair of latches. Almost immediately, there was a deep rumbling sound—the noise of heavy machinery, gears and chains at work. A crack of fluorescent light appeared at the base of the rock wall; a section of it was smoothly ascending, like the door of the Croninger garage at home.

  But to Roland Croninger it looked like the opening of a massive portal into a medieval fortress. His heart had begun to pound, and the crack of fluorescent light reflected in the lenses of his glasses grew wider and brighter.

  “My God,” Elise said softly. The rock wall was opening to reveal a concrete-floored parking deck, its spaces filled with cars and other recreational vehicles. A row of lights hung from a gridwork of iron beams at the ceiling. In the doorway stood a uniformed soldier, waving Phil to come ahead; he eased forward, the grooves guiding the Roamer down a concrete ramp and onto the parking deck. As soon as the tires had disengaged the latches again, the doorway began to rumble shut.

  The soldier motioned Phil along to a parking place between two other campers and made a gesture with a finger across his throat.

  “What’s that mean?” Elise asked uneasily.

  Phil smiled. “He’s telling us to cut the engine.” He did. “We’re here, gang.”

  The rock doorway closed with a solid, echoing thunk, and the outside world was sealed off.

  “We’re in the army now!” Phil told his son, and the boy’s expression was one of dreamy amazement. As they got out of the Roamer two electric carts pulled up; in the first one was a smiling young man, his hair sandy brown and clipped in a crewcut, wearing a dark blue uniform with the Earth House insignia on his breast pocket. The second cart carried two husky men in dark blue jumpsuits and pulled a flat luggage trailer like those used at airports.

  The smiling young man, whose white teeth seemed to reflect the fluorescent lighting, checked the information on his clipboard to make sure he had the name right. “Hi, folks!” he said cheerfully. “Mr. and Mrs. Philip Croninger?”

  “Right,” Phil said. “And our son, Roland.”

  “Hi, Roland. You folks have a good trip from Flagstaff?”

  “A long trip,” Elise told him; she gawked around at the parking deck, figuring that there were well over two hundred cars. “My God, how many people are here?”

  “We’re about ninety-five percent of capacity, Mrs. Croninger. We figure to be a hundred percent by the weekend. Mr. Croninger, if you’ll give these two gentlemen your keys, they’ll bring your luggage along for you.” Phil did, and the two men began to unload suitcases and boxes from the Roamer.

  “I’ve got computer equipment,” Roland told the young man. “It’ll be okay, won’t it?”

  “Sure will. You folks just hop aboard here and I’ll take you to your quarters. Corporal Mathis?” he said, addressing one of the baggage-handlers, “Those go to Section C, Number Sixteen. You folks ready?” Phil had gotten into the front passenger’s seat, and his wife and son in the back. Phil nodded, and the young man drove them across the parking deck and into a corridor—concrete-floored and lined with lights—that angled gently downward. A cool breeze circulated from an occasional strategically placed ceiling fan. Other corridors branched off from the first, and there were arrows that pointed to Sections A, B and C.

  “I’m Hospitality Sergeant Schorr.” The young man offered his hand, and Phil shook it. “Glad to have you with us. Are there any questions I can answer for you?”

  “Well, I’ve taken the tour—back in April—and I know about Earth House,” Phil explained, “but I don’t think my wife and son got the full impact from the pamphlets. Elise was worried about the air circulation down here.”

  Schorr laughed. “Not to worry, Mrs. Croninger. We’ve got two state-of-the-art air-filtration systems, one on-line and one backup. The system would power up within one minute of a Code Red—that’s when we’re… uh… expecting impact and we seal the vents. Right now, though, the fans are drawing in plenty of air from outside, and I can guarantee you that the air on Blue Dome Mountain is probably the cleanest you’ll ever breathe. We’ve got three living areas—Sections A, B and C—on this level, and underneath us is the Command Center and Maintenance Level. Down there, fifty feet below us, is the generator room, the weapons supply, the emergency food and water supply, the radar room and the officers’ quarters. By the way, we have a policy of storing all incoming firearms in our weapons supply. Did you happen to have any with you?”

  “Uh… a .357 Magnum,” Phil said. “Under the back seat. I didn’t know about that policy.”

  “Well, I’m sure you overlooked it in the contract you signed, but I think you’ll agree all firearms should be localized for the safety of Earth House residents. Right?” He smiled at Phil, and Phil nodded. “We’ll code it and give you a receipt, and when you leave us in two weeks you’ll get it back cleaned and shining.”

  “What lands of weapons do you have down there?” Roland asked eagerly.

  “Oh, pistols, automatic rifles, submachine guns, mortars, flamethrowers, grenades, antipersonnel and antivehicle mines, flares—about everything you can think of. And of course we keep our gas masks and antiradiation suits down there, too. When this place was put together, Colonel Macklin wanted it to be an impregnable fortress, and that’s exactly what it is.”

  Colonel Macklin, Roland thought. Colonel James “Jimbo” Macklin. Roland was familiar with the name through articles in the survivalist and weaponry magazines that his father subscribed to. Colonel Macklin had a long record of success as a 105-D Thunderchief pilot over North Vietnam, had been shot down in 1971 and had been a POW until the end of the war; then he’d gone back into Vietnam and Indochina looking for MIAs, and had fought with soldiers of fortune in South Africa, Chad and Lebanon. “Will we get to meet Colonel Macklin?”

  “Orientation is at 0800 hours sharp, in the Town Hall. He’ll be there.”

  They saw a sign reading SECTION C with an arrow pointing to the right. Sergeant Schorr turned off the main corridor, and the tires jubbled over bits of concrete and rock that littered the floor. Water was dripping from above into a widening puddle, and it wet all of them before Schorr could brake the cart. Schorr looked back, his smile slipping; he stopped the cart, and the Croningers saw that part of the ceiling the size of a manhole cover had collapsed. Exposed in the hole were iron bars and chickenwire. Schorr took a walkie-talkie from the cart’s dash, click
ed it on and said, “This is Schorr, near the junction of Central and C corridors. I’ve got a drainage problem here, need a cleanup crew on the double. You read me?”

  “Read you,” a voice replied, weakened by static. “Trouble again?”

  “Uh… I’ve got new arrivals with me, Corporal.”

  “Sorry, sir. Cleanup crew’s on the way.”

  Schorr switched off the walkie-talkie. His smile returned, but his light brown eyes were uneasy. “Minor problem, folks. Earth House has a top-line drainage system, but sometimes we get these minor leaks. Cleanup crew’ll take care of it.”

  Elise pointed upward; she’d noticed the jigsaw of cracks and patches in the ceiling. “That doesn’t look too safe. What if that thing falls in?” She looked wide-eyed at her husband. “My God, Phil! Are we supposed to stay here for two weeks under a leaking mountain?”

  “Mrs. Croninger,” Schorr said in his most soothing voice, “Earth House wouldn’t be at ninety-five percent capacity if it wasn’t safe. Now I agree, the drainage system needs work, and we are getting it in shape, but there is absolutely no danger. We’ve had structural engineers and stress specialists inspect Earth House, and all of them gave it the okay. This is a survivalist condominium, Mrs. Croninger; we wouldn’t be here if we didn’t want to survive the coming holocaust, right?”

  Elise glanced back and forth between her husband and the young man. Her husband had paid fifty thousand dollars for membership in the Earth House timesharing plan: two weeks every year, for life, in what the pamphlets called a “luxurious survivalist fortress in the mountains of southern Idaho.” Of course, she believed the nuclear holocaust was coming soon, too; Phil had shelves of books on nuclear war and was convinced that it would happen within a year, and that the United States would be driven to its knees by the Russian invaders. He had wanted to find a place, as he told her, to “make a last stand.” But she’d tried to talk him out of it, telling him that he was betting fifty thousand dollars that nuclear disaster would happen during one of their two-week timesharing periods, and that was a pretty crazy gamble. He’d explained to her the “Earth House Protection Option” which meant that, for an extra five thousand dollars a year, the Croninger family could find refuge in Earth House at any time, within twenty-four hours of the detonation of an enemy-fired nuclear missile within the continental United States. It was holocaust insurance, he’d told her; everybody knew the bombs were going to fall, it was just a question of when. And Phil Croninger was very aware of the importance of insurance, because he owned one of the largest independent insurance agencies in Arizona.

  “I suppose,” she finally said. But she was troubled by those cracks and patches, and by the sight of that flimsy chickenwire sticking out of the new hole.

  Sergeant Schorr accelerated the electric cart. They passed metal doorways on both sides of the corridor. “Must’ve cost a lot of money to build this place,” Roland said, and Schorr nodded.

  “A few million,” Schorr said. “Not counting loose change. A couple of brothers from Texas put the money into it; they’re survivalists too, and they got rich off oil wells. This place used to be a silver mine back in the forties and fifties, but the lode ran out, and it just sat here for years until the Ausleys bought it. Here we are, just ahead.” He slowed the cart and stopped in front of a metal door marked Sixteen. “Your home sweet home for the next two weeks, folks.” He opened the door with a key affixed to an Earth House insignia key chain, reached inside and switched on the lights.

  Before she followed her husband and son over the threshold, Elise Croninger heard the sound of water dripping, and she saw another puddle spreading in the corridor. The ceiling was leaking in three places, and there was a long, jagged crack two inches wide. Jesus! she thought, unnerved, but she stepped into the room anyway.

  Her first impression was of the starkness of a military barracks. The walls were beige-painted cinder block, decorated with a few oil paintings. The carpet was thick enough, and not a bad color of rust red, but the ceiling seemed awfully low to her. Though it cleared Phil’s head by about six inches, and he was five feet eleven, the apparent lack of height in the suite’s “living area,” as the pamphlets had called it, made her feel almost… yes, she thought, almost entombed. One nice touch, though, was that the entire far wall was a photographic mural of snow-capped mountains, opening up the room a little, if just by optical illusion.

  There were two bedrooms and a single bathroom connecting them. Sergeant Schorr took a few minutes to show them around, demonstrating the whooshing toilet that flushed upward to a tank, he said, that “delivered the waste materials to the forest floor and so aided the vegetation growth. “The bedrooms were also of beige-painted cinder block, and the ceilings were made of cork tile that presumably, Elise thought, hid the latticework of iron beams and reinforcing rods.

  “It’s great, isn’t it?” Phil asked her. “Isn’t this something?”

  “I’m not sure yet,” she replied. “I still feel like I’m in a mine shaft.”

  “Oh, that’ll pass,” Schorr told her amiably. “Some of the first-timers get claustrophobia, but it wears off. Let me give you this,” he said, and he handed Phil an Earth House map that unfolded to show the cafeteria, the gymnasium, the infirmary, and the arcade game room. “The Town Hall’s right here,” he said, and he pointed on the map. “It’s really just an auditorium, but we figure we’re a community down here, right? Let me show you the quickest way to get there from here…”

  In his bedroom, the smaller of the two, Roland had switched on the bedside lamp and was scouting a suitable electrical outlet for his computer. The room was small, but he thought it was okay; it was the atmosphere that was important, and he looked forward to the seminars on “Improvised Weapons,” “Living off the Land,” “Governments in Chaos,” and “Guerrilla Tactics” that the pamphlets had promised.

  He found a good outlet, near enough to the bed so he could prop himself up on pillows while he programmed the King’s Knight game on his computer. In the next two weeks, he thought, he was going to dream up dungeons and monsters to roam them that would make even an expert, jaded King’s Knight like himself tremble in his jambeaus.

  Roland went to the closet and opened it to see how much room he had to store his stuff. The inside was cheaply paneled, a few wire hangers dangling from the rod. But something small and yellow suddenly flitted like an autumn leaf from the back of the closet. Roland instinctively reached out and caught it, closing his fingers around it. Then he walked over to the light and carefully opened his palm.

  Lying stunned in his hand was a fragile yellow butterfly with streaks of green and gold along its wings. Its eyes were dark green pinheads, like gleaming emeralds. The butterfly fluttered, weak and dazed.

  How long have you been in there, Roland wondered. No telling. Probably came in on somebody’s car or camper, or in their clothes. He lifted his hand closer to his face and stared for a few seconds into the creature’s tiny eyes.

  And then he crushed the butterfly in his fist, feeling the body smear under the power of his grip. Zap! he thought. Super Zap! He sure hadn’t come all the way from Flagstaff, he told himself, to share a room with a fucking yellow bug!

  He dropped the mangled remnant into a wastebasket, then wiped the iridescent yellow sparkle from his palm onto his khakis and went back to the living room. Schorr was saying goodnight, and the other two men had just arrived with the luggage and Roland’s computer gear.

  “Orientation at 0800, folks!” Schorr said. “See you there!”

  “Great,” Phil Croninger said excitedly.

  “Great.” Elise’s voice delivered the jab of sarcasm. Sergeant Schorr, smile still locked in place, left Number Sixteen. But the smile disappeared as he stepped into the electric cart, and his mouth became a grim, rigid line. He turned the cart around and raced back to the area where the rubble lay on the floor, and he told the cleanup crew that they’d better move their asses to patch those cracks—and this time keep them p
atched—before the whole goddamned section fell apart.

  Two

  Burning Spears

  The man who liked movies /

  Judgment Day / The

  greeter / Underground

  boys / Discipline and

  control makes the man /

  Charter

  Six

  The man who liked movies

  July 17

  4:40 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time

  New York City

  “He’s still in there, ain’t he?” the black woman with orange hair asked in a whisper, and the Hispanic boy behind the candy counter nodded.

  “Listen!” the boy, whose name was Emiliano Sanchez, said, and his dark eyes widened.

  From beyond the faded red curtains that led into the auditorium of the Empire State Theater on Forty-second Street there came a laugh. It was a sound someone with a slashed throat might have made. The sound of it grew louder and higher, and Emiliano put his hands to his ears; the laughter had reminded him of a locomotive whistle and a child’s shriek, and for a few seconds he was back in time, eight years old and living in Mexico City, witnessing his kid brother being struck and killed by a freight train.

  Cecily stared at him, and as the laughter rose in volume she heard a girl’s scream in it, and she was fourteen years old and lying on the abortionist’s table as the job was done. The vision was gone in an instant, and the laughter began to fade. “Jesus Christ!” Cecily managed to say, whispering again. “What’s that bastard smokin’?”