1987 - Swan Song v4

by Robert McCammon

  “That’s my family,” Leona said, coming into the room. She had left the gun behind. “My husband’s name is Davy, our son’s named Joe and the cat’s called Cleopatra. Was called Cleopatra, I mean. I buried her about two weeks ago, out back. Put her deep, so nothin’ could get at her. Have you two got names, or were you hatched?”

  “I’m Josh Hutchins. This is Sue Wanda, but she’s called Swan.”

  “Swan,” Leona repeated. “That’s a pretty name. I’m pleased to meet the both of you.”

  “Thank you,” Swan said, not forgetting her manners.

  “Oh, Lordy!” Leona bent and picked up some farming and House Beautiful magazines that had tumbled off the coffee table, and then she took a broom from the corner and started sweeping dust toward the fireplace. “House is a godawful wreck!” she apologized as she worked. “Used to be able to keep it as neat as a needle, but lately time slips away. I ain’t had no visitors for quite a number of days!” She swept up the last of the dust and stood staring out a window at the red gloom and the wind-lashed remains of Sullivan. “Used to be a fine town,” she said listlessly. “Had more’n three hundred people livin’ right around here. Fine people, too. Ben McCormick used to say he was fat enough to make three more folks. Drew and Sissy Stimmons lived in that house, over there.” She pointed. “Oh, Sissy loved her hats! Had about thirty of ’em, wore a different hat every Sunday for thirty Sundays and then started over again. Kyle Doss owned the café. Geneva Dewberry ran the public library, and oh, Lordy, could she talk about books!” Her voice was getting quieter and quieter, drifting away. “Geneva said she was gonna sit down and write herself a romance someday. I always believed she would.” She motioned in another direction. “Norm Barkley lived down there at the end of the road. You can’t see the house from here, though. I almost married Norman, when I was a young thing. But Davy stole me away with a rose and a kiss on a Saturday night. Yes, sir.” She nodded, and then she seemed to remember where she was. Her spine stiffened, and she returned the broom to its corner as if she were giving up a dance partner. “Well,” she said, “that was our town.”

  “Where’d they all go?” Josh asked.

  “Heaven,” she replied. “Or Hell. Whichever claimed them first, I reckon. Oh, some of ’em packed up and lit out.” She shrugged. “Where to, I can’t say. But most of us stayed here, in our homes and on our land. Then the sickness started hitting folks… and Death moved in. It’s like a big fist a-knockin’ at your door—boom boom, boom boom, like that. And you know you can’t keep it from comin’ in, but you got to try.” She moistened her lips with her tongue, her eyes glazed and distant. “Sure is some kinda crazy weather for August, ain’t it? Cold enough to freeze a witch’s tit.”

  “You… do know what’s happened, don’t you?”

  She nodded. “Oh, yes,” she said. “Lee Procter had the radio goin’ full blast at the hardware store when I was there buyin’ nails and wire to hang a picture. I don’t know what station he was tuned to, but all of a sudden there was a godawful squallin’, and this man’s voice came on talkin’ real fast about a state of emergency and bombs and all. Then there was a sizzlin’ noise like grease in a hot skillet and the radio went dead. Couldn’t raise a whisper on it. Wilma James come runnin’ in, yellin’ for everybody to look up at the sky. We went out and looked, and we seen the airplanes or bombs or whatever they were passin’ overhead, some of ’em near about to collide with each other. And Grange Tucker said, ‘It’s happenin’!’ Armageddon is happenin’!’ And he just plopped down on the curb in front of his store and watched those things fly past.

  “Then the wind came, and the dust, and the cold,” she said, still staring out the window. “The sun went blood-red. Twisters passed through, and one of ’em hit the McCormick farm and just took it away, didn’t leave nothin’ but foundation stones. Not a trace of Ben, Ginny or the kids. ’Course, everybody in town started comin’ to me, wantin’ to know what lay in the future and all.” She shrugged. “I couldn’t tell ’em I saw skulls where their faces used to be. How can you tell your friends somethin’ like that? Well, Mr. Laney—the postman from Russell County—didn’t show up, and the phone lines were down and there was no ’lectricity. We knew whatever had happened had been a whomper. Kyle Doss and Eddie Meachum volunteered to drive the twenty miles to Matheson and find out what was goin’ on. They never come back. I saw skulls where their faces were, too, but what could I say? You know, sometimes there just ain’t no sense in tellin’ somebody their time’s about up.”

  Josh wasn’t following the old woman’s ramblings. “What do you mean, you saw skulls where their faces were?”

  “Oh. Sorry. I forget that everybody beyond Sullivan don’t know about me.” Leona Skelton turned from the window, a faint smile on her dried-apple face. She picked up one of the lamps, walked across the room to a bookcase and withdrew a leather-bound scrapbook; she took it to Josh and opened it. “There you go,” she said. “That’s me.” She pointed to a yellowed picture and article, carefully scissored from a pulp magazine.

  The headline read, KANSAS SEER FORETOLD KENNEDY DEATH 6 MONTHS BEFORE DIXON! And below that, a smaller line proclaimed, Leona Skelton sees riches, new prosperity for America! The photograph showed a much younger Leona Skelton surrounded by cats and crystal balls.

  “That’s from Fate magazine, back in 1964. See, I wrote a letter to President Kennedy warning him to stay out of Dallas, because he was giving a speech on television and I saw a skull where his face was, and then I used the tarot cards and the Ouija board and found out that Kennedy had a powerful enemy in Dallas, Texas. I even got part of the name, but it came out as Osbald. Anyway, I wrote this letter, and I even made a copy of it.” She flipped the page, showing him a battered, almost illegible handwritten letter dated April 19, 1963. “Two FBI men came to the house and wanted to have a long talk with me. I was pretty calm, but they like to have scared poor Davy out of his clodhoppers! Oh, they were silky-talkin’ fellas, but they could look a hole right through you! I saw they thought I was a crazy lunatic, and they told me not to write any more letters and then they left.”

  She turned another page. The headline on this article read TOUCHED BY AN ANGEL AT BIRTH, KANSAS ‘JEANNE DIXON’ VOWS. “That’s from the National Tattler, about 1965. I just happened to mention to that writer lady that my mama always told me she had a vision of an angel in white robes kissin’ my forehead when I was a baby. Anyway, this one came out right after I found a little boy who’d been missin’ from his folks in Kansas City. He just got mad and ran away from home, and he was hidin’ in an old house about two blocks away.” She flipped more pages, proudly pointing to different articles from the Star, the Enquirer, and Fate magazine. The last article, in a small Kansas newspaper, was printed in 1987. “I haven’t been doin’ so well lately,” she said. “Sinus trouble and arthritis. Kinda clouded me up, I guess. Anyway, that’s who I am.”

  Josh grunted. He’d never believed in extrasensory perception, but from what he’d witnessed lately, anything was possible. “I noticed your crystal balls over there.”

  “That’s my most favorite collection! Those are from all over the world, you know!”

  “They’re real pretty,” Swan added.

  “Thank you kindly, little lady.” She smiled down at Swan, then returned her gaze to Josh. “You know, I didn’t see this thing happenin’. Maybe I’m gettin’ too old to see much anymore. But I had a bad, deep-down gut feelin’ about that astro-nut president. I thought he was the kind to let too many cooks stir the pot. Davy and me, neither one of us voted for him, no sir!”

  The coughing rattled from the back room again. Leona cocked her head, listening intently, but the coughing faded, and Leona visibly relaxed once more. “I don’t have much to offer in the way of food,” she explained. “Got some old corn muffins as hard as cinder blocks and a pot of vegetable soup. I can still do my cookin’ over the fireplace, but I’ve gotten used to eatin’ food that’s as cold as a virgin’s bed. Got a well in
the back yard that still pumps up clean water. So you’re welcome to whatever you’ll have.”

  “Thank you,” Josh said. “I think some soup and corn muffins would be pretty fine, cold or not. Is there any way I can get some of this dirt off me?”

  “You mean you want to take a bath?” She thought for a minute. “Well, I reckon we can do it the old-fashioned way: heat buckets of water in the fire and fill the tub up like that. Little lady, I expect you ought to scrub up, too. ’Course, my drains might clog with all the dirt, and I don’t believe the plumber makes housecalls anymore. What’ve you two been doin’? Rollin’ in the ground?”

  “Sort of,” Swan said. She thought a bath—warm water or cold—was a fine idea. She knew she smelled like a pigsty; still, she was afraid of what her skin might look like under all the dirt. She knew it wasn’t going to be very pretty.

  “I’ll fetch you a couple of buckets, then, and you can pump your own water. Which one wants to go first?”

  Josh shrugged and motioned to Swan.

  “All righty. I’d help you pump, but I’ve got to be close to Davy in case he has a spell. You bring the buckets in, and we’ll warm ’em up in the fireplace. I’ve got a nice claw-footed bathtub that hasn’t nestled a body since this damned mess started.”

  Swan nodded and said thank you, and Leona Skelton waddled off to get the buckets from the kitchen. In the back bedroom, Davy Skelton coughed violently a few times, then the noise subsided.

  Josh was tempted to step back there and take a look at the man, but didn’t. That coughing sounded bad; it reminded him of Darleen’s coughing just before she’d died. He figured it must be radiation poisoning. “The sickness started hitting folks,” Leona had said. Radiation poisoning must have wiped out almost the whole town. But it had occurred to Josh that some people might be able to resist the radiation better than others; maybe it poleaxed some right off and slowly crept up on the rest. He was tired and weak from walking, but otherwise he felt okay; Swan, too, was in pretty good shape except for her burns, and Leona Skelton seemed healthy enough. Back in the basement, Darleen had been fit and boisterous one day, laid low and scalding with fever the next. Maybe some people could go for weeks or months without feeling the full effects of it. He hoped.

  But right now the idea of a warm bath and a meal eaten from a bowl with a real spoon made him delirious. “You okay?” he asked Swan, who stared into space.

  “I’m better,” she replied, but her mind had drifted back to her mama, lying dead under the dirt, and to what PawPaw—or whatever had taken hold of PawPaw—had said. What did it mean? What was the giant supposed to protect her from? And why her?

  She thought of the green seedlings growing from the dirt in the shape of her body. Nothing like that had ever happened to her before. She really hadn’t even had to do anything, not even knead the dirt between her hands. Of course, she was used to the tingling sensation, to feeling sometimes like a fountain of energy was coming up from the earth and through her backbone… but this was different.

  Something had changed, she thought. I could always make flowers grow. Bringing them up from wet earth when the sun shone down was easy. But she’d made grass grow in the dark, without water, and she hadn’t even tried. Something had changed.

  And it came to her, just like that: I’m stronger than I was before.

  Josh crossed to the window and peered out at the dead town, leaving Swan alone with her thoughts. A figure caught his attention out there—a small animal of some kind, standing in the wind. Its head lifted, watching Josh. A dog, he realized. A little terrier. They stared at each other for a few seconds—and then the dog darted away.

  Good luck to you, he thought, and then he turned away, because he knew the animal was bound to die, and he had a sickened gutful of death. Davy coughed twice and called weakly for Leona. She brought the buckets in from the kitchen for Swan’s bathwater, and then she hurried back to see about her husband.

  Thirty-two

  Citizen of the world

  Sister and Artie had found a little piece of Heaven.

  They walked into a small log cabin, hidden in a grove of naked evergreens on the shore of an ice-skimmed lake, and into the wonderful warmth of a kerosene space heater. Tears almost burst from Sister’s eyes as she stumbled across the threshold, and Artie gasped with pleasure.

  “This is the place,” the man in the ski mask said.

  Four other people were already in the cabin: a man and woman, both dressed in ragged summer clothing, who appeared to be young, maybe in their early twenties—but it was hard to tell, because both of them had severe, brown-crusted burns in weird geometric shapes on their faces and arms and under the torn places of their clothing. The young man’s dark hair hung almost to his shoulders, but the crown of his scalp was burned bald and splotched with the brown marks. The woman might have been pretty, with large blue eyes and the fine bones of a fashion model, but her curly auburn hair was almost all scorched away, and the brown crusted marks lay diagonally, like precise penstrokes, across her face. She was wearing cutoff blue jeans and sandals, and her bare legs were also splotched with burns. Her feet were swathed in rags, and she was curled up next to the heater.

  The other two were a thin older man, maybe in his mid-fifties, with bright blue burns disfiguring his face, and a teenaged boy, sixteen or so, wearing jeans and a T-shirt with BLACK FLAG LIVES! in untidy, scrawled letters on the front. Two small studs were pinned in the boy’s left earlobe, and he had all of his rooster-cut orange hair, but gray burn marks streamed down his strong-jawed face as if someone had lit a candle over his forehead and let the wax drip. His deep-socketed green eyes watched Sister and Artie with a hint of amusement.

  “Meet my other guests,” the man in the ski mask said, laying his pack on a bloodstained porcelain counter next to the sink after he’d shut the door and latched it. “Kevin and Mona Ramsey”—he motioned toward the young couple—“Steve Buchanan”—toward the teenage boy—“and the most I can get out of the old man is that he’s from Union City. I didn’t get your names.”

  “Artie Wisco.”

  “You can call me Sister,” she said. “What’s yours?”

  He peeled off the ski mask and hung it on the hook of a coatrack. “Paul Thorson,” he told her. “Citizen of the world.” He took off the jugs of blood and lifted the Tupperware bowls with their grisly contents from his pack.

  Sister was shocked. Paul Thorson’s face was unmarked by burns, and it had been a long time since Sister had seen a normal human face. He had long black hair flecked with gray, and gray swirled back from the corners of his mouth in his full black beard. His flesh was white from lack of sunshine, but it was weathered and wrinkled, and he had a high, deeply creased forehead and the rough-hewn look of an outdoorsman. Sister thought he resembled a mountain man, somebody who might have lived alone in a shack and come down to the valley only to trap beavers or something. Beneath black eyebrows, his eyes were a frosty gray-blue surrounded by dark circles of weariness. He shrugged off his parka—which had made him appear a lot heftier than he actually was—and hung that up as well, then started dumping the contents of the bowls into the sink. “Sister,” he said, “let’s have some of those vegetables you’re carrying around. We’re going to have asshole stew tonight, folks.”

  “Asshole stew?” Sister asked, and frowned. “Uh… what the hell is that?”

  “It means you’re a stupid asshole if you don’t eat it, because that’s all we’ve got. Come on, let’s have the cans.”

  “We’re going to eat… that?” Artie recoiled from the bloody mess. His ribs were hurting, and he had his hand pressed on the pain under his coat.

  “It’s not too bad, man,” the teenager with orange hair said, in a flat Brooklyn accent. “You get used to it. Hell, one of those fuckers tried to eat me. Serves ’em right to be eaten by us, huh?”

  “Absolutely,” Paul agreed, going to work with his knife.

  Sister took off her pack, opened the duffel bag
and gave him some of the canned vegetables. Paul opened them with a can opener and dumped them into a big iron pot.

  Sister shuddered, but the man obviously knew what he was doing. The cabin seemed to be only two large rooms. In this front room, along with the space heater, was a small fireplace of rough stones, a fire burning cheerfully within it and throwing off more warmth and light. A few candles melded to saucers and a kerosene lamp were set around the room, which contained two unrolled sleeping bags, a cot, and a nest of newspapers tucked away in a corner. A cast-iron stove and a good-sized pile of split logs stood on the other side of the room, and when Paul said, “Steve, you can get the stove going now,” the boy got up off the floor, took a shovel from beside the fireplace and put burning pieces of wood into the stove. Sister felt a new rush of joy. They were going to have a hot meal!

  “It’s time now,” the old man spoke up, looking at Paul. “It’s time, isn’t it?”

  Paul glanced at his wristwatch. “Nope. Not quite yet.” He continued chopping up the intestines and brains, and Sister noted that his fingers were long and slender. He had artistic hands, she thought—particularly unsuited to the task they were now performing.

  “This your place?” she asked.

  He nodded. “Been living here… oh, about four years now. During the summer, I’m the caretaker for the Big Pines Ski Area, about six or seven miles that way.” He motioned in the direction of the lake behind the cabin. “In the winter, I cozy on in and live off the land.” He glanced up and smiled grimly. “Winter came early this year.”

  “What were you doing on the highway?”

  “The wolves go up there to chow down. I go up there to hunt wolves. That’s how I found all these other poor souls, wandering around on I-80. I’ve found quite a few more, too. Their graves are out back. I’ll show you, if you like.”

  She shook her head.

  “See, the wolves have always lived in the mountains. They’ve never had reason to come down before. They eat rabbits, deer, and whatever other animals they can find. But now the small animals are dying in their holes, and the wolves can smell new food. So they’re coming down in droves to Supermarket I-80 for the freshest meat. These people made it here before the snow started falling—if you can call that radioactive shit snow.” He grunted with disgust. “Anyway, the food chain’s been knocked off kilter. No small animals for the big ones to eat. Just people. And the wolves are getting real desperate—and real brave.” He plopped the hunks of innards into the pot, then uncapped one of the blood jugs and poured the stuff in. The smell of blood permeated the room. “More wood in there, Steve. We want this shit to boil.”