1987 - Swan Song v4

by Robert McCammon

  The tires rolled on about twenty yards, getting slower and slower, before the truck stopped. Then the tires began to roll backward.

  Paul plunged his foot on the brake, pulled up the parking brake and put the gears into first. The truck halted about a hundred yards from the hilltop.

  Silence fell.

  “That’s that,” Paul said. Steve Buchanan was sitting with one hand on the Magnum and the other strangling the scotch bottle’s neck.

  “What now, man?”

  “Three choices: We sit here for the rest of our lives, we go back to the cabin or we start walking ahead.” He took the bottle, got out into the cold wind, and walked around to the tailgate. “Tour’s over, friends. We’re out of gas.” He snapped a sharp glance at Sister. “You satisfied, lady?”

  “We’ve still got legs.”

  “Yeah. So do they.” He nodded toward the two wolves that were standing at the edge of the forest, watching intently. “I think they’d beat us in a footrace, don’t you?”

  “How far is it back to the cabin?” Kevin Ramsey asked, his arms around his shivering wife. “Can we make it before dark?”

  “No.” He regarded Sister again. “Lady, I’m one damned fool for letting you talk me into this. I knew the gas stations were going to be shut down!”

  “Then why’d you come?”

  “Because… because I wanted to believe. Even though I knew you were wrong.” He sensed motion to his left, saw three more wolves coming through, the wrecks on the east-bound lanes. “We were safe in the cabin. I knew there wasn’t anything left!”

  “All the people who passed this way had to be going somewhere,” she insisted. “You would’ve sat in that cabin until your ass grew roots.”

  “We should’ve stayed!” Mona Ramsey wailed. “Oh, Jesus, we’re going to die out here!”

  “Can you stand up?” Sister asked Artie. He nodded. “Do you think you can walk?”

  “Got good shoes,” he rasped. He sat up, pain stitched across his face. “Yeah, I think I can.”

  She helped him to his feet, then lowered the tailgate and just about lifted Artie to the pavement. He clutched at his side and leaned against the truck. Sister slung the rifle’s strap around her shoulder, hefted the duffel bag carefully to the ground and stepped down from the truck bed. She looked Paul Thorson in the face. “We’re going that way.” She motioned toward the hilltop. “Are you coming with us or staying here?”

  Her eyes were the color of steel against her sallow, burn-blotched face. Paul realized that she was either the craziest or toughest mutha he’d ever met. “There’s nothing over there but more nothing.”

  “There’s nothing where we came from.” Sister picked up the duffel bag and, with Artie leaning on her shoulder, started walking up the hill.

  “Give me the rifle,” Paul told her. She stopped. “The rifle,” he repeated. “That won’t do you a damned bit of good. By the time you get it unslung you’ll be hash. Here.” He offered her the bottle. “Take a long swig. Everybody gets a drink before we start. And for God’s sake, keep those blankets around you. Protect your faces as much as you can. Steve, bring the blanket from the front seat. Come on, hurry it up!”

  Sister drank from the bottle, gave Artie a swallow and then returned it and the rifle to Paul. “We keep together,” he told all of them. “We stay in a tight group—just like the wagons when the Indians attacked. Right?” He watched the converging wolves for a moment, lifted the rifle, aimed and shot one through the side. It fell, snapping, and the others leapt upon it, tearing it to pieces. “Okay,” Paul said. “Let’s get on down this damned road.”

  They began walking, the wind whipping around them in vicious crosscurrents. Paul took the lead and Steve Buchanan brought up the rear. They’d gone no more than twenty feet when a wolf lunged out from behind an overturned car and shot across their path. Paul raised his rifle, but the animal had already found cover beyond another hulk. “Watch our backs!” he shouted to Steve.

  The animals were coming in from all sides. Steve counted eight scurrying up from the rear. He eased back the Magnum’s hammer, his heart whacking like a Black Flag drumbeat.

  Another wolf ran in from the left, a streak of motion headed for Kevin Ramsey. Paul whirled and fired; the bullet sang off the pavement, but the animal turned away. Instantly, two more darted in from the right. “Look out!” Sister shouted, and Paul turned in time to shatter a wolf’s leg with one slug. The animal danced crazily across the highway before four others dragged it down. He pumped shots at them and hit two, but the rest fled. “Bullets!” he called, and Sister dug a handful out of the box he’d given her to carry in her duffel bag. He hastily reloaded, but he’d given his gloves to Mona Ramsey, and his sweaty skin was sticking to the rifle’s cold metal. The rest of the bullets went into his coat pocket.

  They were seventy yards from the top of the hill.

  Artie leaned heavily on Sister. He coughed blood and staggered, his legs about to fold. “You can make it,” she said. “Come on, keep moving.”

  “Tired,” he said. He was as hot as a furnace, and he spread warmth to the others gathered around him. “Oh… I’m… so…”

  A wolf’s head lunged from the open window of a burned Oldsmobile at their side, the jaws snapping at Artie’s face. Sister jerked him aside and the teeth came together with a crack! that was almost as loud as Paul’s rifle shot a second later. The wolf’s head spewed blood and brains and the beast slithered down into the car.

  “… tired,” Artie finished.

  Steve watched two wolves racing in from behind. He lifted the Magnum with both hands, his palms slick on the butt though he was freezing. One of the animals shot off to the side, but the other kept coming. He was just about to fire when it closed within ten feet, snarled and ran behind a wrecked Chevy. He could’ve sworn the snarl had spoken his name.

  There was motion on his left. He started to turn, but he knew he was too late.

  He screamed as a wolf shape hit him, knocking his legs out from under him. The Magnum went off, jumping out of his hands and sliding away across the ice. A large silver-gray wolf had Steve’s right ankle and started dragging him toward the woods. “Help me!” he shouted. “Help me!”

  The old man acted faster than Paul; he took three running steps, lifted the shortwave radio between his hands and smashed it down on the wolf’s skull. The radio burst apart in a confetti spray of wires and transistors, and the wolf released Steve’s ankle. Paul shot it through the ribs, and it, too, was jumped by three more. Steve limped over to get the Magnum, the old man staring horrified at the metallic mess in his hands; then Steve guided him back to the group, and the old man let the last of the radio fall.

  Upwards of fifteen wolves were swirling around them, stopping to ravage the dying or wounded. More were coming from the forest. Holy Jesus! Paul thought as the army of wolves circled them. He took aim at the nearest.

  A form squirmed out from beneath a car hulk on the side away from his rifle. “Paul!” Sister shrieked—and she saw the wolf leap for him before she could do or say anything else.

  He twisted violently around, but he was hit and knocked down under a clawing, snarling weight. The beast’s jaws strained for his throat—and clamped shut on the rifle that Paul had thrown up to guard his face. Sister had to let go of Artie to rush the wolf, and she kicked the thing in the side with all her strength. The wolf released Paul’s rifle, snapped at her foot and tensed to spring at her. She saw its eyes—maddened, defiant, like the eyes of Doyle Halland.

  The wolf leaped.

  There were two cannonlike explosions, and the bullets from Steve’s Magnum almost tore the wolf in half. Sister dodged aside as the wolf sailed past her, its teeth still snapping and its guts trailing behind it.

  She drew a breath, turned toward Artie and saw two wolves hit him at once.

  “No!” she shouted as Artie fell. She bashed one of the animals with her duffel bag and knocked it about eight feet across the pavement. The secon
d chewed on his leg and started dragging him.

  Mona Ramsey screamed and bolted from the group, running past Steve in the direction they’d come. Steve tried to grab her but missed, and Kevin went after her, caught her around the waist and lifted her off her feet just as a wolf sprang from beneath a wreck and trapped her left foot between its teeth. Kevin and the beast pulled Mona in a deadly tug-of-war as the woman screamed and thrashed and more wolves ran out of the woods. Steve tried to fire, but he feared hitting the man or woman. He hesitated, cold sweat freezing to his face, and he was still in a trance when a seventy-pound wolf hit him in the shoulder like a diesel train. He heard the sound of his shoulder breaking, and he lay writhing in pain as the wolf doubled back and began gnawing at his gun hand.

  The things were everywhere now, darting in and leaping. Paul fired, missed, had to duck a shape that came flying at his head. Sister swung her duffel bag at the wolf that had Artie’s leg, struck its skull and drove it back. Kevin Ramsey had lost the tug-of-war; the wolf wrenched Mona out of his grasp and was attacked by another that wanted the same prize. They fought as Mona frantically tried to crawl away.

  Paul fired and hit a wolf that was about to jump Sister from behind, and then claws were on his shoulders and he was slammed face first into the pavement. The rifle spun away.

  Three wolves converged on Sister and Artie. The old man was kicking wildly at the animal that was attacking Steve’s hand and arm. Sister saw Paul down, his face bleeding and the beast on top of him trying to claw through his leather jacket. She realized they were less than ten yards from the top of the hill, and this was where they were going to die.

  She hauled Artie up like a sack of laundry. The three wolves came in slowly, biding their time. Sister braced herself, ready to swing the duffel bag and kick for all she was worth.

  Over the snarls and shouts, she heard a deep bass growling noise. She glanced toward the hilltop. The sound was coming from the other side. It must be a horde of wolves racing for their share, she realized—or the monster of all wolves awakened from its lair. “Well, come on!” she shouted at the three who were creeping up on her. They hesitated, perhaps puzzled by her defiance, and she felt craziness pulling at her mind again. “Come on, you motherfu—”

  Its engine growling, a yellow snowplow came over the hilltop, its treads crunching over debris. Clinging to the outside of the glass-enclosed cab was a man in a hooded green parka, and he was carrying a rifle with a sniperscope. Following behind the plow was a white Jeep like the kind used by postmen. Its driver zipped the vehicle around the wrecks, and another man with a rifle leaned out the Jeep’s passenger side, shouting and firing into the air. The man riding shotgun on the snowplow carefully aimed and squeezed off a shot. The middle of the three wolves dropped, and the other two turned tail.

  The animal on Paul’s back looked up, saw the oncoming vehicles and fled. Another rifle shot sang off the pavement near the two fighting over Mona Ramsey, and they ran for the forest as well. Mona reached her husband and flung her arms around him. The wolf that had made a bloody mess of Steve’s arm gave it one last shake and ran as a bullet zipped past its skull. Steve sat up, shouting, “Fuckers! You fuckers!” in a high, hysterical voice.

  The white Jeep skidded to a halt in front of Paul, who was still struggling to get the air back in his lungs. He got to his knees, his jaw and forehead scraped raw and his nose broken, gushing blood. The driver and the man with the rifle stepped out of the postman’s Jeep. On the snowplow, the sharpshooter was still popping off bullets at the wolves heading into the woods, and he hit three of them before the highway was cleared of living animals.

  The Jeep’s driver was a tall, ruddy-cheeked man who wore dungarees under a fleece-lined coat. On his head was a cap that advertised Stroh’s beer. His dark brown eyes shifted back and forth over the tattered group of survivors. He looked at all the dead and dying wolves, and he grunted. Then he reached work-weathered fingers into a pocket of his dungarees, withdrew something and offered it to Paul Thorson. “Gum?” he asked. Paul looked at the pack of Wrigley’s Spearmint and had to laugh.

  Sister was stunned. She walked past the white Jeep, still bearing Artie’s weight on her shoulder. Artie’s shoes scraped on the pavement. She walked past the snow plow and reached the top of the hill.

  Off to the right, through dead trees, smoke was rising from the chimneys of wood-framed houses on the streets of a small village. She saw the steeple of a church, saw United States Army trucks parked on a softball field, saw a Red Cross banner hanging from the side of a building, saw tents and cars and campers by the thousands, scattered in the village streets and through the hills around it. A roadside sign just over the hilltop announced Homewood Next Exit.

  Artie’s body began to slide to the ground. “No,” she said, very firmly, and she held him standing with all her strength.

  She was still holding him up when they came to help her to the white Jeep.

  Forty-four

  My people

  By the light of an oil lamp, Colonel Macklin admired himself in the mirror of the Airstream trailer’s bathroom.

  The gray-green Nazi uniform was a bit tight around the chest and midsection, but the sleeves and trouser legs were long enough. At his waist was a black leather holster and a loaded Luger. On his feet were Nazi hobnailed boots—again, just a bit too small, but Macklin was determined to make them do. Medals and ribbons adorned the uniform’s jacket, and though Macklin didn’t know what any of them were for, he thought they looked very impressive.

  The closet in the pigsty of the late Freddie Kempka’s bedroom had been full of Nazi uniforms, flak jackets, boots, holsters and the like. A Nazi flag was fixed to the wall over the bed, and a bookcase held volumes such as The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Military Strategy and Maneuver, Medieval Warfare, and A History of Torture. Roland had gotten hold of the books and had been devouring them with pure passion. Sheila Fontana slept in the other bedroom, staying mostly to herself except when Macklin needed her; she seemed content to do her duty, though she lay cold and unmoving, and several times Macklin had heard her cry out in the night, as if waking up from a dark dream.

  During the few days they’d occupied the trailer, Macklin had made a thorough inventory of what Freddie Kempka had collected: There was enough junk food and soft drinks to feed an army, plenty of bottled water and canned food as well—but Macklin and Roland were most interested in the weapons. Kempka’s bedroom was an arsenal of machine guns, rifles, pistols, a crate of flares, smoke grenades and fragmentation grenades, and boxes and bags and clips of ammunition scattered around like gold in a royal treasure house. The Shadow Soldier didn’t have to tell Macklin that he had found paradise.

  Macklin regarded his face in the mirror. His beard was growing out, but it was so gray it made him look old. Kempka had left a straight razor behind, and Macklin decided he would give himself a shave. Also, his hair was too long and scraggly; he preferred the close-cropped military look. Kempka had also left a pair of scissors that would do the job very well.

  He leaned forward, staring into his own eyes. They were still deep-sunken and bore the memory of the pain that had ripped through his wound in the Great Salt Lake—a pain so soul-shattering that it had sloughed away the old dead skin that had confined him for so long. He felt new, reborn and alive again—and in his icy blue eyes he saw the Jimbo Macklin that used to be, back in the days when he was young and fast. He knew the Shadow Soldier was proud of him, because he was a whole man again.

  He did miss his right hand, but he was going to learn how to use a machine gun or rifle just as effectively with the left. After all, he had all the time in the world. The wound was bound up with strips of bedsheet, and it was still draining, but the heaviness was gone. Macklin knew the salt water had burned the infection out.

  He thought he looked very handsome, very—yes—kingly in the Nazi uniform. Maybe it had been a German colonel’s uniform, he mused. It was in fine shape, just a few moth holes in the s
ilk lining; Kempka obviously had taken great care of his collection. There seemed to be more lines in his face, but something about that face was wolfish and dangerous. He figured he’d lost twenty-five pounds or more since the disaster at Earth House. Still, there was just one small thing about his face that bothered him…

  He lifted his hand and touched what seemed to be a brown scab about the size of a quarter, just under his left eye. He tried to peel it off, but it was melded tightly to the skin. On his forehead were four dime-sized scabs that he had at first taken for warts, but those couldn’t be peeled off either. Maybe it’s skin cancer, he thought. Maybe the radiation caused it. But he’d noticed a similar scablike growth, also the size of a dime, on Roland’s chin. Skin cancer, he thought. Well, he would take the straight razor and slice them off when he shaved, and that would be the end of it. His hide was too tough for skin cancer.

  But it was strange, he thought, that the little round scabs were only on his face. Not his hand, or his arms, or anywhere else. Just his face.

  He heard a knock on the trailer door, and he left the bathroom to answer it.

  Roland and Lawry, both carrying rifles, had returned from the recon mission they’d been on with three other able-bodied soldiers. Last night, one of the perimeter sentries had seen the flicker of lights to the south, three or four miles across the desert.

  “Two trailers,” Lawry reported, trying not to stare too hard at the Nazi uniform the colonel wore. Kempka had always been too fat to squirm into it. “Pulled by a Chevy van and a Pontiac. All the vehicles look in pretty good shape.”

  “How many people?” Macklin asked, opening one of the jugs of bottled water and offering it to Lawry.

  “We saw sixteen people,” Roland told him. “Six women, eight men and two children. They seemed to have plenty of gas, food and water, but all of them are burn-scarred. Two of the men can hardly walk.”

  “They have guns?”

  “Yes, sir.” Roland took the jug of water from Lawry and drank. He thought the uniform looked wonderful on the King, and he wished there’d been one his size to wear. He couldn’t remember much of what had happened that night with Freddie Kempka, but he recalled having a vivid dream in which he killed Mike Armbruster. “One of the men had a rifle.”