“Right.”
“I know it’s time!” the old man whined. “It’s got to be!”
“No, it’s not,” Kevin Ramsey told him. “Not until after we’ve had our food.”
Paul added the other jug of blood to the pot and began to stir it with a wooden spoon. “You people might as well take off your coats and stay for dinner, unless you want to head for the next restaurant down the road.”
Sister and Artie looked at each other, both of them queasy from the smell of the stew. Sister was the first to take off her gloves, coat and woolen cap, and then Artie reluctantly did the same.
“Okay.” Paul lifted the pot and put it on one of the stove’s burners. “Stoke that baby’s engine and let’s get the fire up.” As Steve Buchanan worked on the fire, Paul turned to a cupboard and produced a bottle that still had a little red wine left in it. “This is the last soldier,” he told them. “Everybody gets one good jolt.”
“Wait.” Sister unzipped her knapsack again and brought out the six-pack of Olympia beer. “This might go better with the stew.”
Their eyes lit up like penny candles.
“My God!” Paul said. “Lady, you just bought my soul.” He gingerly touched the six-pack as if afraid it might evaporate, and when it didn’t, he worked one can from its plastic ring. He shook it carefully, was pleased to find it hadn’t frozen. Then he popped the tab and tilted it to his mouth, drinking long and deep with his eyes closed in rapture.
Sister handed beers to everyone but Artie and shared the bottle of Perrier with him. It wasn’t as satisfying as the beer, but it tasted fine anyway.
The asshole stew made the cabin reek like a slaughterhouse. From outside came a low, distant howling.
“They smell it,” Paul said, glancing out a window. “Oh, those bastards are going to be all around this place in a few minutes!”
The howling continued and grew as more wolf voices added dissonant notes and vibrato.
“It’s got to be time!” the old man insisted after he’d finished his beer. “Isn’t it?”
“It’s almost time.” Mona Ramsey had a gentle, lovely voice. “But not yet. Not yet.”
Steve was stirring the pot. “It’s boiling. I think the shit’s as ready as it’s gonna be.”
“Great.” Artie’s stomach was about to curdle.
Paul ladled the stew out in brown clay bowls. It was thicker than Sister had thought it would be, and the smell was heavy, but not quite as bad as some of the things she’d scavenged from garbage bags back in Manhattan. The stuff was dark red, and if you didn’t look too closely you might have thought it was just a bowl of hearty beef stew.
Outside, the wolves howled in unison, much closer to the cabin than before, as if they knew that one of their kin was about to go down human gullets.
“Down the hatch,” Paul Thorson said, and he took the first sip.
Sister tilted the bowl to her mouth. The soup was bitter and gritty, but the meat wasn’t too bad. The saliva suddenly flooded into her mouth, and she gulped the hot food down like an animal herself. After two swallows, Artie had begun to go pale.
“Hey,” Paul said to him, “if you’re gonna puke, do it outside. One speck on my clean floor and you sleep with the wolves.”
Artie shut his eyes and kept eating. The others attacked their bowls, scraping them clean with their fingers and holding them out for more like orphans from Oliver Twist.
The wolves howled and clamored just outside the cabin. Something slammed against the wall, and Sister jumped so hard she spilled asshole stew on her sweater.
“They’re just curious,” Steve told her. “Don’t sweat it, lady. It’s cool.”
Sister had a second bowl. Artie looked at her in horror and crawled away, his hand pressed against a throbbing pain at his ribs. Paul noticed, but he said nothing.
No sooner had the pot been cleaned out than the old man said irritably, “It’s time! Right now!”
Paul put aside his empty bowl and checked his wristwatch again. “It hasn’t been a whole day yet.”
“Please.” The old man’s eyes were like those of a lost puppy’s. “Please… all right?”
“You know the rules. Once a day. No more, no less.”
“Please. Just this once… can’t we do it early?”
“Aw, shit!” Steve said. “Let’s go ahead and get it over with!”
Mona Ramsey shook her head violently. “No, it isn’t time! It hasn’t been a whole day yet! You know the rules!”
The wolves were still growling outside, as if they had their muzzles right up to the cracks in the door. Two or more of them started a gnashing, howling fight. Sister had no idea what everyone in the room was talking about, but whatever it was must be vital, she thought. The old man was near tears.
“Just this once… just this once,” he moaned.
“Don’t do it!” Mona told Paul, her eyes defiant. “We’ve got to have rules!”
“Oh, fuck the rules!” Steve Buchanan banged his bowl down on the counter. “I say we do it and get it over with!”
“What’s going on here?” Sister asked, puzzled.
The others stopped arguing and looked at her. Paul Thorson glanced at his wristwatch, then sighed heavily. “Okay,” he said. “Just this once, we do it early.” He held up a hand to ward off the young woman’s objections. “We’re only going to be about an hour and twenty minutes early. That’s not enough to hurt.”
“Yes it is!” Mona was almost shouting. Her husband put his hands on her shoulders, as if to restrain her. “It could ruin everything!”
“Let’s vote on it, then,” Paul offered. “We’re still a democracy, right? Everybody say ‘aye’ who wants to do it early.” Immediately the old man shouted, “Aye!” Steve Buchanan stuck his thumb up in the air. The Ramseys were silent. Paul paused, listening to the call of the wolves, and Sister could see him thinking. Then he quietly said, “Aye. The ayes have it.”
“What about them?” Mona pointed at Sister and Artie. “Don’t they get votes?”
“Hell, no!” Steve said. “They’re new! They don’t get votes yet!”
“The ayes have it,” Paul repeated firmly, staring at Mona. “One hour and twenty minutes early won’t make a big difference.”
“It will!” she replied, and then her voice cracked. She started sobbing, while her husband held her shoulders and tried to soothe her. “It’ll ruin everything! I know it will!”
“You two come with me,” Paul told Sister and Artie, and he motioned them into the cabin’s other room.
In the room there was a regular bed with a quilted cover, a few shelves of paperback and hardbound books, and a desk and chair. On the desk was a battered old Royal typewriter and a thin sheaf of typing paper. Balls of paper were scattered around an overflowing wicker trash can. An ashtray was full of matches, and tobacco ash had spilled from the bowl of a black briar pipe. A couple of candles were set in saucers on a little table beside the bed, and a window looked out toward the tainted lake.
But that was not all the window revealed.
Parked behind the cabin was an old Ford pickup truck, the battleship-gray paint flaking off its sides and hood and red creepers of rust starting to eat through the metal.
“You’ve got a truck!” Sister said excitedly. “My God! We can get out of here!”
Paul glanced at the truck, scowled and shrugged. “Forget it, lady.”
“What? What do you mean, forget it? You’ve got a truck! We can get to civilization!”
He picked up his pipe and jammed a finger into the bowl, digging at a carbon deposit. “Yeah? And where might that be?”
“Out there! Along I-80!”
“How far, do you think? Two miles? Five? Ten? What about fifty?” He put the pipe aside and glared at her, then he drew a green curtain shut between this room and the other. “Forget it,” he repeated. “That truck’s got about a teacupful of gas in it, the brakes are shot, and I doubt if it’ll even crank. The battery was fucked up ev
en on the best of days.”
“But…” She looked out at the vehicle again, then at Artie and finally back to Paul Thorson. “You’ve got a truck,” she said, and she heard herself whine.
“The wolves have got teeth,” he replied. “Sharp ones. Do you want those poor souls out there to find out how sharp? You want to pile them in a pickup truck and go for a nice excursion through the Pennsylvania countryside with a teacupful of gas in the tank? Sure. No problem to call a tow truck when we break down. Take us right to the gas pumps, and we’ll pull out our trusty credit cards and be on our way.” He was silent for a moment, and then he shook his head. “Please don’t torture yourself. Forget it. We’re here to stay.”
Sister heard the wolves howling, the sound floating through the woods and over the frozen lake, and she feared that he might be right.
“Talking about that bum truck’s not why I asked you in here.” He bent down and pulled an old wooden footlocker out from beneath the bed. “You two still seem to have most of your marbles,” he said. “I don’t know what you’ve been through, but those people out there are hanging on by their fingernails.”
The footlocker was sealed by a fist-sized padlock. He fished a key from his jeans pocket and opened the lock. “We play a little game around here. It might not be a very nice game, but I figure it keeps them from letting go. It’s kind of like walking to the mailbox every day because you’re expecting a love letter or a check.” He lifted the footlocker’s lid.
Inside, cushioned with newspapers and rags, were three bottles of Johnny Walker Red Label Scotch, a .357 Magnum revolver and a box or two of ammunition, some moldy-looking manuscripts bound with rubber bands, and another object wrapped in heavy plastic. He began to unfold the plastic. “It’s funny as shit, it really is,” he said. “I came out here to nowhere to get away from people. Can’t stand the breed. Never could. I’m sure as hell no Good Samaritan. And then all of a sudden the highway’s covered with cars and corpses, and people are running like hell and I’m up to my ears in the human race. I say screw it! We deserved everything we got!” He unfolded the last layer of plastic to reveal a radio with an intricate set of dials and knobs. He lifted it from the footlocker, opened the desk drawer and got out eight batteries. “Shortwave,” he told them as he began to put the batteries in the back of the radio. “I used to like to listen to concerts from Switzerland in the middle of the night.” He closed the footlocker and snapped the padlock on again.
“I don’t understand,” Sister said.
“You will. Just don’t get too bent out of shape, no matter what happens out there in the next few minutes. Like I say, it’s all a game, but they’re pretty jumpy today. I just wanted to prepare you.” He motioned for them to follow, and they returned to the front room.
“It’s my turn today!” the old man cried out, sitting up on his knees, his eyes shining.
“You did it yesterday,” Paul told him calmly. “It’s Kevin’s turn today.” He offered the radio to the young man. Kevin hesitated, then took it as if accepting a child in swaddling clothes.
The others gathered around him, except for Mona Ramsey, who crawled petulantly away. But even she watched her husband excitedly. Kevin grasped the tip of the radio’s recessed antenna and drew it all the way out; it jutted up about two feet, the metal shining like a promise.
“Okay,” Paul said. “Switch it on.”
“Not yet,” the young man balked. “Please. Not just yet.”
“Go ahead, man!” Steve Buchanan’s voice shook. “Do it!”
Kevin slowly turned one of the knobs, and the red needle moved all the way to one end of the frequency dial. Then he laid his finger against a red button and let it rest there as if he couldn’t bear to press it. He drew a sudden, sharp breath—and his finger punched the ON button.
Sister winced, and everyone else breathed or flinched or shifted, too.
No sound came from the radio.
“Crank the volume up, man!”
“It’s already set high,” Kevin told him, and slowly—delicately—he began to move the needle along the frequency dial.
A quarter inch more, and still dead air. The red needle continued to move, almost imperceptibly. Sister’s palms were sweating. Slowly, slowly: another fraction of an inch further.
A high burst of static suddenly wailed from the speaker, and Sister and everyone else in the room jumped. Kevin looked up at Paul, who said, “Atmosphere’s supercharged.” The red needle moved on, through the thickets of little numbers and decimal points, searching for a human voice.
Different tones of static faded in and out, weird cacophonies of atmospheric violence. Sister heard the howl of the wolves outside mingling with the static noise—a lonely sound, almost heartbreaking in its loneliness. Spaces of dead air alternated with the grating, terrible static—and Sister knew she was hearing ghosts from the black craters where cities had been.
“You’re going too fast!” Mona objected and he slowed the needle’s progress to a speed that might tempt a spider to spin a web between his fingers. Sister’s heart pounded at every infinitesimal change in the pitch or volume of static pouring from the speaker.
Finally, Kevin came to the end of the dial. His eyes were luminous with tears.
“Try AM,” Paul told him.
“Yeah! Try AM!” Steve said, pressing over Kevin’s shoulder. “There’s gotta be somethin’ on AM!”
Kevin turned another small dial to change from shortwave to AM, and he began to lead the red searching needle back over the numbers again. This time, except for abrupt pops and clicks and a faint, distant humming noise like honeybees at work, the band was almost completely dead. Sister didn’t know how long it took Kevin to reach the other end of the dial; it could have been ten minutes, or fifteen, or twenty. But he stretched it out to the very last faint sizzle—and then he sat holding the radio between his hands, staring at it as a pulse beat steadily at his temple.
“Nothing,” he whispered, and he pressed the red button.
Silence.
The old man put his hands to his face.
Sister heard Artie, who was standing beside her, give a helpless, despairing sigh. “Not even Detroit,” he said listlessly. “Dear God… not even Detroit.”
“You turned it way too fast, man!” Steve told Kevin Ramsey. “Shit, you spun through it! I thought I heard something—it sounded like a voice!—and you went right through it!”
“No!” Mona shouted. “There was no voice! We did it too early, and that’s why there was no voice! If we’d done it on time, by the rules, we would’ve heard somebody this time! I know it!”
“It was my turn.” The old man’s pleading eyes turned toward Sister. “Everybody always steals my turn.”
Mona began to sob. “We didn’t go by the rules! We missed the voice because we didn’t go by the rules!”
“Fuck it!” Steve snapped. “I heard a voice! I swear to God I did! It was right…” He started to take the radio, but Paul Thorson snatched it out of Kevin’s hands before he could. Paul lowered the antenna and turned away, going back through the curtain into the other room. Sister couldn’t believe what she’d just witnessed; anger stirred within her, and pity for the poor, hopeless souls. She strode purposefully into the room where Paul Thorson was wrapping the radio back up in its protective plastic.
He looked up at her, and she lifted her right hand and gave him a slap across the face with all the fury of judgment behind it. The blow knocked him sprawling and left a red handprint on his cheek. Still, as he fell, he grasped the radio protectively to his chest and took the fall on his shoulder. He lay blinking up at her.
“I’ve never seen anything so cruel in all my life!” Sister raged. “Do you think that’s funny? Do you get pleasure out of that? Get up, you sonofabitch! I’ll knock your ass right through that wall!” She advanced on him, but he held up a hand to ward her off, and she hesitated.
“Wait,” he croaked. “Hold on. You don’t get it yet, do you?”
<
br /> “You’re gonna get it, shitass!”
“Back off. Just wait, and watch. Then you can kick butt if you still want to.” He pulled himself up, continued wrapping the radio and replaced it in the footlocker; then he snapped the padlock shut and pushed the footlocker underneath the bed again. “After you,” he said, motioning her into the front room.
Mona Ramsey was bent over in the corner, sobbing as her husband tried to comfort her. The old man had curled up against one wall, staring into space, and Steve was kicking and hammering at the wall with his fist, shouting obscenities. In the center of the room, Artie stood very still as the red-haired teenager rampaged around him.
“Mona?” Paul said, with Sister standing just behind him and to the side.
The young woman raised her eyes to his. The old man looked at him, and so did Kevin, and Steve stopped hammering at the walls.
“You’re right, Mona,” Paul went on. “We didn’t go by the rules. That’s why we didn’t hear a voice. Now, I’m not saying we will hear one if we go by the rules tomorrow. But tomorrow is another day, right? That’s what Scarlett O’Hara said. Tomorrow we’ll turn the radio on and try again. And if we don’t hear anything tomorrow, we’ll try the day after that. You know, it would take some time to repair a radio station and kick the juice back on. It would take quite a while. But tomorrow we’ll try again. Right?”
“Sure!” Steve said. “Hell, it would take a while to get the juice back on!” He grinned, looking at all of them in turn. “I bet they’re trying to get the stations back on the air right now! God, that’d be a job, wouldn’t it?”
1987 - Swan Song v4 Page 31
