1987 - Swan Song v4

by Robert McCammon

  “I haven’t seen very much beauty in the last few days,” he replied. “Except for that. You’re right. It is a very, very beautiful piece of junk.” He smiled faintly. “Or crown. Or whatever it is you choose to believe.”

  Sister nodded and peered into the depths of the glass circle. Beneath the glass, the threads of precious metals flared like sparklers. The pulsing of a large, deep brown topaz caught her attention; she could sense Doyle Halland watching her, could hear the crackle of the fire and the sweep of the wind outside, but the brown topaz and its hypnotic rhythm—so soft, so steady—filled up her vision. Oh, she thought, what are you? What are you? What—

  She blinked.

  She was no longer holding the circle of glass.

  And she was no longer sitting before the fire in the New Jersey house.

  Wind swept around her, and she smelled dry, scorched earth and… something else. What was it?

  Yes. Now she knew. It was the odor of burned corn.

  She was standing on a vast, flat plain, and the sky above her was a whirling mass of dirty gray clouds through which electric-blue streaks of lightning plunged. Charred cornstalks lay about her by the thousands—and the only feature on that awful wasteland was a large dome that looked like a grave about a hundred yards away.

  I’m dreaming, she thought. I’m really sitting in New Jersey. This is a dreamscape—a picture in my mind, that’s all. I can wake up anytime I want to, and I’ll be back in New Jersey again.

  She looked at the strange dome and wondered how far she could push the limits of this dream. If I take a step, she thought, will the whole thing fall to pieces like a movie set? She decided to find out, and she took a single step. The dreamscape remained intact. If this is a dream, she told herself, then, by God, I’m dreamwalking somewhere a long way from New Jersey, because I can feel that wind in my face!

  She walked over the dry earth and cornstalks toward the dome; no dust plumed beneath her feet, and she had the sensation of drifting over the landscape like a ghost instead of actually walking, though she knew her legs were moving. As she neared the dome she saw it was a mass of dirt, thousands of burned cornstalks, pieces of wood and cinder blocks all jammed together. Nearby was a twisted thing of metal that might once have been a car, and another one lay ten or fifteen yards beyond the first. Other pieces of metal, wood and debris lay scattered around her: here was what appeared to be the nozzle from a gas pump, there was the burned lid of a suitcase. The rags of clothes—small clothes—were lying about. Sister walked—dreamwalked, she thought—past part of a wagon wheel half buried in the dirt, and there was the remnant of a sign that still held barely decipherable letters: P… A… W.

  She stopped about twenty yards from the gravelike dome. This is a funny thing to be dreaming about, she thought. I could be dreaming about a thick steak and an ice cream sundae.

  Sister looked in all directions, saw nothing but desolation.

  But no. Something on the ground caught her eye—a little figure of some kind—and she dreamwalked toward it.

  A doll, she realized as she got nearer. A doll with a bit of blue fur still clinging to its body, and two plastic eyes with little black pupils that Sister knew would jiggle around if it was picked up. She stood over the doll. The thing was somehow familiar, and she thought of her own dead daughter perched in front of the TV set. Reruns of an old show for kids called “Sesame Street” had been one of her favorite programs.

  And Sister remembered the child pointing gleefully at the screen and shouting: “Cooookies!”

  The Cookie Monster. Yes. That’s who that was, lying there at her feet.

  Something about that doll there on the desolate plain struck a note of terrible sadness in Sister’s heart. Where was the child to whom this doll belonged? Blown away with the wind? Or buried and lying dead under the earth?

  She bent down to pick up the Cookie Monster doll.

  And her hands went right through it—as if either the scene or she were made of smoke.

  This is a dream, Sister thought. This is not real! This is a mirage inside my head, and I’m dreamwalking through it!

  She stepped back from the doll. It was for the best that it remain there, in case the child who had lost it someday came back this way.

  Sister squeezed her eyes shut. I want to go back now, she thought. I want to go back where I was, back far away from here. Far away. Far a—

  “… for your thoughts.”

  Sister was startled by the voice, which seemed to be whispered right into her ear. She looked to her side. Doyle Halland’s face hovered above her, caught between the firelight and the reflection of the jewels. “What?”

  “I said, a penny for your thoughts. Where’d you go?”

  Where indeed, Sister wondered. “Far away from here,” she said. Everything was as it had been before. The vision was gone, but Sister imagined she could still smell burned corn and feel that wind on her face.

  The cigarette was burning down between her fingers. She took one last draw from it and then thumped it into the fireplace. She put the glass ring down into her bag again and held the bag close to her body. Behind her eyes, she could still clearly see the dome of dirt, the wagon wheel, the mangled remains of cars and the blue-furred Cookie Monster.

  Where was I? she asked herself—and she had no answer.

  “Where do we go in the morning?” Halland inquired.

  “West,” she answered. “We keep going west. Maybe we’ll find a car with a key in the ignition tomorrow. Maybe we’ll find some other people. I don’t think we’ll have to worry much about food for a while. We can scavenge enough to eat as we go. I was never very fussy about my meals, anyway.” Water was still going to be a problem, though. The kitchen and bathroom faucets in this house were dry, and Sister figured that the shock waves had shattered water mains all over the metro area.

  “Do you really think it’s going to be better anywhere else?” He lifted his burned eyebrows. “The wind’s going to throw radiation all over this country. If the blast and the fires and the radiation don’t finish people off, it’s going to be hunger, thirst and the cold. I’d say there’s nowhere to go after all, is there?”

  Sister stared into the fire. “Like I say,” she said finally, “nobody has to go with me who doesn’t want to. I’m getting some sleep now. Good night.” She crawled over to where the others were huddled under the rugs, and she lay down between Artie and Beth and tried to find sleep while the wind shrieked beyond the walls.

  Doyle Halland carefully touched the metal splinter in his leg. He sat slightly slumped forward, and his gaze ticked toward Sister and the bag she held so protectively. He grunted thoughtfully, smoked his cigarette down to the filter and tossed it into the fireplace. Then he positioned himself in a corner, facing Sister and the others, and he stared at them for perhaps a full five minutes, his eyes glittering in the gloom, before he leaned his head back and went to sleep sitting up.

  Twenty-six

  New turn of the game

  It began with a mangled voice calling from beyond the gymnasium’s barricaded door: “Colonel? Colonel Macklin?”

  Macklin, on his knees in the dark, did not answer. Not far away, Roland Croninger clicked the safety off the Ingram gun, and he could hear Warner’s harsh breathing over to his right.

  “We know you’re in the gym,” the voice continued. “We searched everywhere else. Got yourself a nice little fortress, don’t you?”

  As soon as Roland had reported the incident at the cafeteria, they’d gone to work blocking the gym’s doorway with stones, cables and parts of broken-up Nautilus machines. The boy had had the good idea to scatter shards of glass out in the corridor, to cut the marauders up when they came creeping through the dark on their hands and knees. A moment before the voice, Macklin had heard curses and pained mutterings, and he knew the glass had done its job. In his left hand he held a makeshift weapon that had been part of a Nautilus Super Pullover machine—a curved metal bar about two feet long,
with twelve inches of chain and a dangling, macelike sprocket at its business end.

  “Is the boy in there?” the voice inquired. “I’m looking for you, boy. You really did a job on me, you little fucker.” And now Roland knew Schorr had escaped, but from the way he sounded the hospitality sergeant had lost half his mouth.

  Teddybear Warner’s nerve shattered. “Go away! Leave us alone!”

  Oh, shit, Macklin thought. Now they know they’ve got us!

  There was a long silence. Then, “I’ve got some hungry people to feed, Colonel, sir. We know you’ve got a bagful of food in there. It’s not right for you to have it all, is it?” When Macklin didn’t reply, Schorr’s distorted voice roared, “Give us the food, you sonofabitch!”

  Something gripped Macklin’s shoulder; it felt like a cold, hard claw digging into his skin. “More mouths, less food,” the Shadow Soldier whispered. “You know what it’s like to be hungry, don’t you? Remember the pit, back in Nam? Remember what you did to get that rice, mister?”

  Macklin nodded. He did remember. Oh, yes, he did. He remembered knowing that he was going to die if he didn’t get more than one fourth of a small rice cake every time the Cong guards dropped one down, and he’d known the others—McGee, Ragsdale and Mississippi—could read their own tombstones, too. A man had a certain look in his eyes when he was pushed against the wall and stripped of his humanity; his entire face changed, as if it was a mask cracking open to show the face of the real beast within.

  And when Macklin had decided what it was he had to do, the Shadow Soldier had told him how to do it.

  Ragsdale had been the weakest. It had been a simple thing to press his face into the mud while the others were sleeping.

  But one third of the rice wasn’t enough, the Shadow Soldier said. Macklin had strangled McGee, and then there were two.

  Mississippi had been the toughest to kill. He was still strong, and he’d fought Macklin off again and again. But Macklin had kept at him, attacking him when he tried to sleep, and finally Mississippi had lost his mind and crouched in the corner, calling for Jesus like a hysterical child. It had been an easy thing, then, to grasp Mississippi’s chin and wrench his head violently backward.

  Then all the rice was his, and the Shadow Soldier said he’d done very, very well.

  “Can you hear me, Colonel, sir?” Schorr sneered beyond the barricade. “Just give us the food and we’ll go!”

  “Bullshit,” Macklin answered. There was no more use in hiding. “We’ve got weapons in here, Schorr.” He desperately wanted the man to believe they had more than just one Ingram gun, a couple of metal clubs, a metal cleaver and some sharp rocks. “Back off!”

  “We’ve brought along some toys of our own. I don’t think you want to find out what they are.”

  “You’re bluffing.”

  “Am I? Well, sir, let me tell you this: I found a way to get to the garage. There’s not much left. Most everything’s smashed to hell, and you can’t get to the drawbridge crank. But I found what I needed, Colonel, sir, and I don’t give a damn how many guns you’ve got in there. Now: Does the food come out, or do we take it?”

  “Roland,” Macklin said urgently, “get ready to fire.”

  The boy aimed the Ingram gun in the direction of Schorr’s voice.

  “What we’ve got stays here,” Macklin told him. “You find your own food, just like we found ours.”

  “There is no more!” Schorr raged. “You sonofabitch, you’re not going to kill us like you killed everybody else in this damn—”

  “Fire,” Macklin ordered.

  Roland squeezed the trigger with no hesitation.

  The gun jumped in his hands as the tracers streaked across the gym like scarlet comets. They hit the barricade and the wall around the door, popping and whining madly as they ricocheted. In the brief, jerky light, a man—not Schorr—could be seen trying to climb through the space between the pile of rubble and the top of the door. He started to pull back when the firing began, but he suddenly screamed, caught in the glass and metal cables that Roland had arranged. Bullets hit him and he writhed, getting more tangled up. His screaming stopped. Arms came up, grabbed the body and heaved it backward into the corridor.

  Roland released the trigger. His pockets were full of ammo clips, and the colonel had drilled him in changing the clips quickly. The noise of the machine gun faded. The marauders were silent.

  “They’re gone!” Warner shouted. “We ran ’em off!”

  “Shut up!” Macklin warned him. He saw a flicker of light from the corridor—what might’ve been a match being struck. In the next instant, something afire came flying over the barricade. It hit with the sound of shattering glass, and Macklin had a second to smell gasoline before the Molotov cocktail blew, a sheet of fire leaping across the gym. He jerked his head down behind his rock pile hiding place as glass whined like yellowjackets around his ears. The flames shot past him, and when the explosion was over he looked up and saw a puddle of gas burning about fifteen feet away.

  Roland had ducked as well, but small fragments of glass had nicked his cheek and shoulder. He lifted his head and fired again at the doorway; the bullets hit the top of the barricade and ricocheted harmlessly.

  “You like that, Macklin?” Schorr taunted. “We found us a little gasoline in some of the car tanks. Found us some rags and a few beer bottles, too. We’ve got more where that one came from. You like it?”

  Firelight flickered off the walls of the wrecked gym. Macklin hadn’t counted on this; Schorr and the others could stand behind the barricade and toss those bastards over the top. He heard a metal tool of some kind scrape against the debris that blocked the door, and some of the rocks slid away.

  A second gasoline-filled bottle, a flaming rag jammed down into it, sailed into the gym and exploded near Captain Warner, who cowered behind a mound of stones, bent metal and Nautilus weights. The gas spattered like grease from a skillet, and the captain cried out as he was hit by flying glass. Roland fired the Ingram gun at the doorway as a third bomb landed between him and Colonel Macklin, and he had to leap aside as burning gas splashed at his legs. Shards of glass tugged at Macklin’s jacket, and one caught him over the right eyebrow and snapped his head back like a punch.

  The gym’s rubble—mats, towels, ceiling tiles, ripped-up carpeting and wood paneling—was catching fire. Smoke and gasoline fumes swirled through the air.

  When Roland looked up again, he could see blurred figures furiously digging their way over the barricade. He gave them another burst of bullets, and they scattered back into the corridor like roaches down a hole. A gas-filled Dr Pepper bottle exploded in reply, the whoosh of flames searing Roland’s face and sucking the breath from his lungs. He felt a stinging pain and looked at his left hand; it was covered in flame, and silver-dollar-sized circles of fire burned all over his arm. He shouted with terror and scrambled toward the mop bucket full of toilet water.

  The flames were growing, merging and advancing across the gym. More of the barricade crumbled, and Macklin saw the marauders coming in; Schorr was leading them, armed with a broom handle sharpened into a spear, a bloodstained rag wrapped around his swollen, wild-eyed face. Behind him were three men and a woman, all carrying primitive weapons: jagged-edged stones and clubs made from broken furniture. As Roland frantically washed off the burning gasoline Teddybear Warner hobbled out from his shelter and fell down on his knees in front of Schorr, his hands upraised for mercy. “Don’t kill me!” he begged. “I’m with you! I swear to God, I’m with—”

  Schorr drove the sharpened broomstick into Warner’s throat. The others swarmed over him as well, beating and kicking the captain as he flopped on the end of the spear. The flames threw their shadows on the walls like dancers in Hell. Then Schorr jerked the spear from Warner’s throat and whirled toward Colonel Macklin.

  Roland picked up the Ingram gun at his side. A hand suddenly clamped around the back of his neck, jerking him to his feet. He saw the blurred image of a man in tat
tered clothes standing over him, about to smash a rock into his skull.

  Schorr charged Macklin. The colonel staggered to his feet to defend himself with the high-tech mace.

  The man gripping Roland’s neck made a choking sound. He was wearing eyeglasses with cracked lenses held together at the bridge of his nose with a Band-Aid.

  Schorr feinted with the spear. Macklin lost his balance and fell, twisting away as the spear grazed his side. “Roland, help me!” he screamed.

  “Oh… my God,” the man with the cracked eyeglasses breathed. “Roland… you’re alive…”

  Roland thought the man’s voice was familiar, but he wasn’t sure. Nothing was certain anymore but the fact that he was a King’s Knight. All that had gone before this moment were shadows, flimsy and insubstantial, and this was real life.

  “Roland!” the man said. “Don’t you know your own—”

  Roland brought the Ingram gun up and blew most of the man’s head away. The stranger staggered back, broken teeth chattering in a mask of blood, and fell into the fire.

  The other people threw themselves upon the garbage bag and tore wildly at it, splitting it open and fighting one another for the scraps. Roland turned toward Schorr and Colonel Macklin; Schorr was jabbing at the colonel with his spear while Macklin used his metal club to parry the thrusts. Macklin was being steadily forced into a corner, where the leaping firelight revealed a large airshaft set in the cracked wall, its wire mesh grille hanging by one screw.