1987 - Swan Song v4

by Robert McCammon

  Roland started to shoot, but smoke swirled around the figures and he feared hitting the King. His finger twitched on the trigger—and then something struck him in the small of the back and knocked him onto his face on the floor, where he lay struggling for breath. The machine gun fell from his hand, and the woman with insane, red-rimmed eyes who’d thrown the rock scrabbled on her hands and knees to get it.

  Macklin swung the mace at Schorr’s head. Schorr ducked, stumbling over the rocks and burning debris. “Come on!” Macklin yelled. “Come and get me!”

  The crazy woman crawled over Roland and picked up the Ingram gun. Roland was stunned, but he knew both he and the King were dead if she was able to use the weapon; he grabbed her wrist, and she shrieked and fought, her teeth gnashing at his face. She got her other hand up and went for his eyes with her fingers, but he twisted his head away to keep from being blinded. The woman wrenched her wrist loose and, still shrieking, aimed the machine gun.

  She fired it, the tracers streaking across the gym.

  But she was not aiming at Colonel Macklin. The two men who were fighting over the garbage can were caught by the bullets and made to dance as if their shoes were aflame. They went down, and the crazy woman scrambled toward the scraps with the gun clutched against her breasts.

  The chatter of the Ingram gun had made Schorr’s head swivel around—and Macklin lunged forward, striking at the other man’s side with the mace. He heard Schorr’s ribs break like sticks trodden underfoot. Schorr cried out, tried to backpedal, tripped and fell to his knees. Macklin lifted the mace high and smashed it down on the center of Schorr’s forehead, and the man’s skull dented in the shape of a Nautilus cam. Then Macklin was standing over the body, striking the skull again and again. Schorr’s head started to change shape.

  Roland was on his feet. A short distance away, the crazy woman was stuffing her mouth with the burned food. The flames were growing higher and hotter, and dense smoke whirled past Macklin as, finally, the strength of his left arm gave out. He dropped the mace and gave Schorr’s corpse one last kick to the ribs.

  The smoke got his attention. He watched it sliding into the shaft, which was about three feet high and three feet wide—large enough to crawl through, he realized. It took him a minute to clear the fatigue out of his mind. The smoke was being drawn into the airshaft. Drawn in. Where was it going? To the surface of Blue Dome Mountain? To the outside world?

  He didn’t care about the garbage bag anymore, didn’t care about Schorr or the crazy woman or the Ingram gun. There had to be a way out up there somewhere! He wrenched the grille off and crawled into the shaft. It led upward at a forty degree angle, and Macklin’s feet found the heads of bolts in the aluminum surface to push himself against. There was no light ahead, and the smoke was almost choking, but Macklin knew that this might be their only chance to get out. Roland followed him, inching upward after the King in this new turn of the game.

  Behind them, in the burning gym, they heard the crazy woman’s voice float up into the tunnel: “Where’d everybody go? It’s hot in here… so hot. God knows I didn’t come all this way to cook in a mine shaft!”

  Something about that voice clutched at Roland’s heart. He remembered a voice like that, a long time ago. He kept moving, but when the crazy woman screamed and the smell of burning meat came up into the tunnel he had to stop and clasp his hands over his ears, because the sound made the world spin too fast and he feared being flung off. The screaming stopped after a while, and all Roland could hear was the steady sliding of the King’s body further along the shaft. Coughing, his eyes watering, Roland pushed himself onward.

  They came to a place where the shaft had been crushed closed. Macklin’s hand found another shaft branching off from the one they’d been following: this one was a tighter fit, and it clamped around the colonel’s shoulders as he squeezed into it. The smoke was still bad, and his lungs were burning. It was like creeping up a chimney with a fire blazing below, and Roland wondered if this was what Santa Claus felt like.

  Further along, Macklin’s questing fingers touched Fiberglas. It was part of the system of air filters and baffles that purified what Earth House residents breathed in case of nuclear attack. Sure helped a whole hell of a lot, didn’t it? he thought grimly. He ripped away the filter and kept crawling. The shaft curved gradually to the left, and Macklin had to tear through more filters and louverlike baffles made of rubber and nylon. He was straining hard to breathe, and he heard Roland gasping behind him. The kid was damned tough, he thought. Anybody who had a will to live like that kid did was a person to reckon with, even if he looked like a ninety-pound weakling.

  Macklin stopped. He’d touched metal ahead of him, blades radiating from a central hub. One of the fans that drew air in from the outside. “We must be close to the surface!” he said. Smoke was still moving past him in the dark. “We’ve got to be close!”

  He put his hand against the fan’s hub and pushed until the muscles in his shoulder cracked. The fan was bolted securely in place and wasn’t going to move. Damn you! he seethed. Damn you to Hell! He pushed again, as hard as he could, but all he did was exhaust himself. The fan wasn’t going to let them out.

  Macklin laid his cheek against cool aluminum and tried to think, tried to picture the blueprints of Earth House in his mind. How were the intake fans serviced? Think! But he was unable to see the blueprints correctly; they kept shivering and falling to pieces.

  “Listen!” Roland cried out.

  Macklin did. He couldn’t hear anything but his own heartbeat and his raw lungs heaving.

  “I hear wind!” Roland said. “I hear wind moving up there!” He reached up, felt the movement of air. The faint sound of shrilling wind came from directly above. He ran his hands over the crumpled wall to his right, then to his left—and he discovered iron rungs. “There’s a way up! There’s another shaft right over our heads!” Grasping the bottom rung, Roland drew himself up, rung by rung, to a standing position. “I’m climbing up,” he told Macklin, and he began to ascend.

  The windscream was louder, but there was still no light. He had climbed maybe twenty feet when his hand touched a metal flywheel over his head. Exploring, his fingers glided over a cracked concrete surface. Roland thought it must be the lid of a hatch, like a submarine’s conning tower hatch that could be opened and closed by the flywheel. But he could feel the strong suction of air there, and he figured the blast must have sprung the hatch, because it was no longer securely sealed.

  He grasped the flywheel, tried to turn it. The thing wouldn’t budge. Roland waited a minute, building up his strength and determination; if ever he needed the power of a King’s Knight, it was at this moment. He attacked the flywheel again; this time he thought it might have moved a half inch, but he wasn’t sure.

  “Roland!” Colonel Macklin called from below. He’d finally put the blueprints together in his mind. The vertical shaft was used by workmen to change the air filters and baffles in this particular sector. “There should be a concrete lid up there! It opens to the surface!”

  “I’ve found it! I’m trying to get it open!” He braced himself with one arm through the nearest rung, grasped the flywheel and tried to turn it with every ounce of muscle left in his body. He shook with the effort, his eyes closed and beads of sweat popped up on his face. Come on! he urged Fate, or God, or the Devil, or whoever worked these things. Come on!

  He kept straining against it, unwilling to give up.

  The flywheel moved. An inch. Then two inches. Then four. Roland shouted, “I’ve got it!” and he started cranking the flywheel with a sore and throbbing arm. A chain clattered through the teeth of gears, and now the wind was shrieking. He knew the hatch was lifting, but he saw no light.

  Roland had given the wheel four more revolutions when there was a piercing wail of wind, and the air, full of stinging grit, thrashed madly around the shaft. It almost sucked him right out, and he hung onto a rung with both hands as the wind tore at him. He was weak from
his battle with the flywheel, but he knew that if he let go the storm might lift him up into the dark like a kite and never set him down again. He shouted for help, couldn’t even hear his own voice.

  An arm without a hand locked around his waist. Macklin had him, and they slowly descended the rungs together. They retreated into the shaft.

  “We made it!” Macklin shouted over the howling. “That’s the way out!”

  “But we can’t survive in that! It’s a tornado!”

  “It won’t last much longer! It’ll blow itself out! We made it!” He started to cry, but he remembered that discipline and control made the man. He had no conception of time, no idea how long it had been since he’d first seen those bogies on the radar scope. It must be night, but the night of which day he didn’t know.

  His mind drifted toward the people who were still down in Earth House, either dead or insane or lost in the dark. He thought of all the men who’d followed him into this job, who’d had faith in him and respected him. His mouth twitched into a crooked grin. It’s crazy! he thought. All those experienced soldiers and loyal officers lost, and just this skinny kid with bad eyes left to go on at his side. What a joke! All that remained of Macklin’s army was one puny-looking high school geek!

  But he recalled how Roland had rationalized putting the civilians to work, how he’d calmly done the job down in that awful pit where Macklin’s hand remained. The kid had guts. More than guts; something about Roland Croninger made Macklin a little uneasy, like knowing a deadly little thing was hiding beneath a flat rock you had to step over. It had been in the kid’s eyes when Roland had told him about Schorr waylaying him in the cafeteria, and in his voice when Roland had said, “We’ve got hands.” Macklin knew one thing for sure: He’d rather have the kid at his side than at his back.

  “We’ll get out when the storm’s over!” Macklin shouted. “We’re going to live!” And then tears did come to his eyes, but he laughed so the kid wouldn’t know it.

  A cold hand touched his shoulder. Macklin’s laughter stopped.

  The Shadow Soldier’s voice was very close to his ear. “Right, Jimbo. We’re going to live.”

  Roland shivered. The wind was cold, and he pushed his body against the King’s for warmth. The King hesitated—and then laid his handless arm across Roland’s shoulder.

  Sooner or later the storm would stop, Roland knew. The world would wait. But it would be a different world. A different game. He knew it would be nothing like the one that had just ended. In the new game, the possibilities for a King’s Knight might be endless.

  He didn’t know where they would go, or what they would do; he didn’t know how much remained of the old world—but even if all the cities had been nuked, there must be packs of survivors, roaming the wastelands or huddled in basements, waiting. Waiting for a new leader. Waiting for someone strong enough to bend them to his will and make them dance in the new game that had already begun.

  Yes. It would be the greatest game of King’s Knight ever. The game board would stretch across ruined cities, ghost towns, blackened forests and deserts where meadows used to be. Roland would learn the rules as he went along, just like everybody else. But he was already one step ahead, because he recognized that there was great power to be grabbed up by the smartest and strongest. Grabbed up and used like a holy axe, poised over the heads of the weak.

  And maybe—just maybe—his would be the hand that held it. Alongside the King, of course.

  He listened to the roar of the wind and imagined that it spoke his name in a mighty voice and carried that name over the devastated land like a promise of power yet to be.

  He smiled in the dark, his face splattered with the blood of the man he’d shot, and waited for the future.

  Five

  Wheel of FortuneTurning

  Black circle / The hurting

  sound / Strange new

  flower / Tupperware

  bowls / Big fist a-knockin’ /

  Citizen of the world /

  Paper and paints

  Twenty-seven

  Black circle

  Sheets of freezing rain the color of nicotine swirled over the ruins of East Hanover, New Jersey, driven before sixty-mile-an-hour winds. The storm hung filthy icicles from sagging roofs and crumbling walls, broke leafless trees and glazed all surfaces with contaminated ice.

  The house that sheltered Sister, Artie Wisco, Beth Phelps, Julia Castillo and Doyle Halland trembled on its foundations. For the third day since the storm had hit they huddled before the fire, which boomed and leapt as wind shot down the chimney. Almost all the furniture was gone, broken up and fed to the flames in return for life-sustaining heat. Every so often they heard the walls pop and crack over the incessant shriek of the wind, and Sister flinched, thinking that at any minute the entire flimsy house would go up like cardboard—but the little bastard was tough and hung together. They heard noises like trees toppling, and Sister realized it must be the sound of other houses blowing apart around them and scattering before the storm. Sister asked Doyle Halland to lead them in prayer, but he looked at her through bitter eyes and crawled into a corner to smoke the last cigarette and stare grimly at the fire.

  They were out of food and had nothing more to drink. Beth Phelps had begun to cough up blood, fever glistening in her eyes. As the fire ebbed Beth’s body grew hotter—and, admit it or not, the others sat closer around her to absorb the warmth.

  Beth leaned her head against Sister’s shoulder. “Sister?” she asked, in a soft, exhausted voice. “Can I… can I hold it? Please?”

  Sister knew what she meant. The glass thing. She took it from her bag, and the jewels glowed in the low orange firelight. Sister looked into its depths for a few seconds, remembering her experience of dreamwalking across a barren field strewn with burned cornstalks. It had seemed so real! What is this thing? she wondered. And why do I have it? She put the glass ring into Beth’s hands. The others were watching, the reflection of the jewels scattered across their faces like the rainbow lamps of a faraway paradise.

  Beth clutched it to her. She stared into the ring and whispered, “I’m thirsty. I’m so very, very thirsty.” Then she was silent, just holding the glass and staring, with the colors slowly pulsating.

  “There’s nothing left to drink,” Sister replied. “I’m sorry.”

  Beth didn’t answer. The storm made the house shake for a few seconds. Sister felt someone staring a hole through her, and she looked up at Doyle Halland. He was sitting a few feet away, his legs outstretched toward the fire and the sliver through his thigh catching a glint of light.

  “That’s going to have to come out sooner or later,” Sister told him. “Ever heard of gangrene?”

  “It’ll keep,” he said, and his attention drifted to the circle of glass.

  “Oh,” Beth whispered dreamily. Her body shivered, and then she said, “Did you see it? It was there. Did you see it?”

  “See what?” Artie asked.

  “The stream. Flowing between my fingers. I was thirsty, and I drank. Didn’t anybody else see it?”

  The fever’s got her, Sister thought. Or maybe… maybe she had gone dreamwalking, too.

  “I put my hands in,” Beth continued, “and it was so cool. So cool. Oh, there’s a wonderful place inside that glass…”

  “My God!” Artie said suddenly. “Listen, I… I didn’t say anything before, because I thought I was going nuts. But…” He looked around at all of them, finally stopped at Sister. “I want to tell you about something I saw, when I looked into that thing.” He told them about the picnic with his wife. “It was weird! I mean, it was so real I could taste what I’d eaten after I came back. My stomach was full, and I wasn’t hungry anymore!”

  Sister nodded, listening intently. “Well,” she said, “let me tell you where I went when I looked into it.” When she was finished, the others remained silent. Julia Castillo was watching Sister, her head cocked to one side; she couldn’t understand a word that was being said, but s
he saw them all looking at the glass thing, and she knew what they were discussing.

  “My experience was pretty real, too,” Sister went on. “I don’t know what it means. Most likely it doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it’s a picture that just floated out of my head, I don’t know.”

  “The stream is real,” Beth said. “I know it is. I can feel it, and I can taste it.”

  “That food filled my belly,” Artie told them. “It kept me from being hungry for a while. And what about being able to talk to her”—he motioned toward Julia—“with that thing? I mean, that’s damned strange, isn’t it?”

  “This is something very special. I know it is. It gives you what you want when you need it. Maybe it’s…” Beth straightened up and peered into Sister’s eyes. Sister felt the fever rolling off her in waves. “Maybe it is magic. A kind of magic that’s never been before. Maybe… maybe the blast made it magic. Something with the radiation, or s—”

  Doyle Halland laughed. They all jumped, startled by the harshness of that laugh, and looked at him. He grinned in the firelight. “This is about the craziest thing I’ve ever heard in my life, folks! Magic! Maybe the blast made it magic!” He shook his head. “Come on! It’s just a piece of glass with some jewels stuck in it. Yes, it’s pretty. Okay. Maybe it’s sensitive, like a tuning fork or something. But I say it hypnotizes you. I say the colors do something to your mind; maybe they trigger the pictures in your mind, and you think you’re eating a picnic lunch, or drinking from a stream, or walking on a burned-up field.”

  “What about my being able to understand Spanish, and her understanding English?” Sister asked him. “That’s a hell of a hypnosis, isn’t it?”

  “Ever heard of mass hypnosis?” he asked pointedly. “This thing comes under the same heading as bleeding statues, visions and faith-healing. Everybody wants to believe, so it comes true. Listen, I know. I’ve seen a wooden door that a hundred people swear holds a picture of Jesus in the grain. I’ve seen a window glass that a whole block sees as an image of the Virgin Mary—and do you know what it was? A mistake. An imperfection in the glass, that’s all. There’s nothing magic about a mistake. People see what they want to see, and they hear what they want to hear.”