1987 - Swan Song v4

by Robert McCammon

  “I don’t know why he wants you,” Lawry continued, walking right at her heels. “He could have a young RL, a pretty one. One who takes baths. You’re a two-legged lice farm.”

  She ignored him. She knew he hated her because she’d never let him touch her, not even once. She’d taken on everybody who could pay her with gasoline, food, water, pretty trinkets, cigarettes, clothes or alcohol—but she wouldn’t take on Judd Lawry if his prick gushed refined oil. Even in a man’s world, a woman had her pride.

  He was still ranting at her when she walked between two tents and almost into a squat, square trailer painted pitch black She stopped abruptly, and Lawry almost barreled into her. His nagging ceased. Both of them knew what went on inside Roland Croninger’s black trailer—the AOE’s “interrogation center”—and being so close to it stirred in their minds the stories they’d heard of Captain Croninger’s inquisition methods. Lawry remembered what Croninger had done to Freddie Kempka years ago, and he knew that the captain was best avoided.

  Sheila regained her composure first. She walked past the trailer, its windows sealed with sheet metal, and on toward the colonel’s command center. Lawry silently followed.

  The Airstream trailer was hooked to the cab of a diesel truck surrounded by six armed guards. Spaced at intervals were fires that burned in oil drums. As Sheila approached, one of the guards rested his hand on the pistol beneath his coat.

  “It’s okay,” Lawry said. “He’s expecting her.” The guard relaxed and let them pass, and they walked up a set of intricately carved wooden risers that led to the Airstream’s closed door. The three-step staircase even had a bannister, into which was cut the grotesque faces of demons with lolling tongues, contorted nude human figures and deformed gargoyles. The subject matter was nightmarish, but the workmanship was beautiful, the faces and figures carved by a hand that knew blades, then sanded and polished to a high luster. Red velvet pads had been tacked down on the surface of each riser, as if on the steps to an emperor’s throne. Sheila had never seen the staircase before, but Lawry knew it was a recent gift from the man who’d joined the AOE back in Broken Bow. It galled Lawry that Alvin Mangrim had already been made a corporal, and he wondered how Mangrim had gotten his nose chewed off. He’d seen the man working with the Mechanical Brigade and hanging around with a gnarled little dwarf he called “Imp,” and Mangrim was another sonofabitch he wouldn’t dare turn his back on.

  Lawry knocked on the door.

  “Enter,” came Colonel Macklin’s raspy voice.

  They went in. The front room was dark but for the single oil lamp burning atop Macklin’s desk. He was sitting behind the desk, studying maps. His right arm lay across the desktop, almost like a forgotten appendage, but the black-gloved palm of his new right hand was turned up, and the lamplight glinted on the sharp points of the many nails that pierced it.

  “Thank you, Lieutenant,” Macklin said, without lifting his leather-masked face. “You’re dismissed.”

  “Yes, sir.” Lawry shot a smirking glance at Sheila, then left the trailer and closed the door.

  Macklin was calculating the rate of march between Sutton and Nebraska City, where he planned to lead the Army of Excellence across the Missouri River. But the supplies were dwindling by the day, and the AOE hadn’t made a successful raid since the destruction of Franklin Hayes’s army back in Broken Bow. Still, the ranks of the AOE continued to swell as stragglers from other dead settlements drifted in, seeking shelter and protection. The AOE had abundant manpower, weapons and ammunition, but the grease that slicked the wheels of forward movement was running out.

  The ruins of Sutton had still been smoking when the AOE’s advance armored cars pulled in just before full dark. All that was worth taking was already gone, even the clothes and shoes from the piles of dead bodies. There were signs that grenades and Molotov cocktails had been used, and at the eastern edge of the burning debris were the treadmarks of heavy vehicles and the footprints of soldiers marching off through the snow.

  And Macklin had realized that there was another army—perhaps as large as or larger than the AOE—heading east right in front of them, looting settlements and taking the supplies that the Army of Excellence needed to survive. Roland had seen blood in the snow and reasoned that there would be wounded soldiers struggling to keep up with the main body. A small recon force might be able to capture some of those stragglers, Roland had suggested. They might be brought back and interrogated. Colonel Macklin had agreed, and Roland had taken Captain Braden, Sergeant Ulrich and a few soldiers out in an armored truck.

  “Sit down,” the colonel told Sheila.

  She walked into the circle of light. A chair had been prepared for her, facing the colonel’s desk. She sat down, edgy and not knowing what to expect. In the past, he’d always waited for her in his bed.

  He continued to work on his maps and charts. He was dressed in his uniform with the Army of Excellence patch sewn over the breast pocket and four bars of gold-colored thread attached to each shoulder to signify his rank. Covering his scalp was a gray woolen cap, and the black leather mask obscured his face except for his left eye. She hadn’t seen him without that mask for several years, and she didn’t particularly care to. Behind Macklin was a rack of pistols and rifles, and a black, green and silver AOE flag was tacked neatly to the pine paneling.

  He let her wait a few more minutes, and then he lifted his head. His frosty blue eye chilled her. “Hello, Sheila.”

  “Hello.”

  “Were you alone? Or did you have company?”

  “I was alone.” She had to listen hard to understand all his words. His speech had gotten worse since the last time she’d visited there, less than a week ago.

  “Well,” Macklin said, “sometimes it’s good to sleep alone. You get more rest that way, don’t you?” He opened a filigreed silver box that sat atop his desk. In it were about twenty precious cigarettes—not soggy butts or rerolled chewing tobacco, but the real thing. He offered the box to her, and she immediately took a cigarette. “Take another,” he urged. She took two more. Macklin pushed a pack of matches across the desktop to her, and she lit up the first cigarette and inhaled it like true oxygen.

  “Remember when we bluffed our way into here?” he asked her. “You, me and Roland? Remember when we bargained with Freddie Kempka?”

  “Yeah.” She’d wished a thousand times that she still had a supply of cocaine and uppers, but that stuff was hard to come by these days. “I do.”

  “I trust you, Sheila. You and Roland are about the only ones I can trust.” He pulled his right arm toward him and cradled it against his chest. “That’s because we know each other so well. People who’ve been through so much together should trust each other.” His gaze lifted from Sheila’s face. He looked at the Shadow Soldier, who was standing behind her chair, just at the edge of the darkness. His eye shifted back to her again. “Have you been entertaining many officers lately?”

  “A few.”

  “How about Captain Hewlitt? Sergeant Oldfield? Lieutenant Vann? Any of those?”

  “I guess.” She shrugged, and her mouth curled into a faint smile through the haze of smoke. “They come and go.”

  “I’ve heard things,” Macklin said. “It seems that some of my officers—I don’t know who—aren’t very pleased with the way I’m running the Army of Excellence. They think we should plant roots, start a settlement of our own. They don’t understand why we’re moving east, or why we have to stamp out the mark of Cam. They can’t see the grand scheme, Sheila. Especially the young ones—like Hewlitt and Vann. I made them officers against my better judgment. I should have waited to see what they were made of. Well, I know now. I believe they want to take my command away from me.”

  She was silent. Tonight there would be no screwing, just one of the colonel’s sessions of raving. But that was fine with Sheila; at least Rudy couldn’t find her here.

  “Look at this,” he said, and he turned one of the maps that he’d been working on t
oward her. It was an old, creased and stained map of the United States, torn from an atlas. The names of the states had been marked through, and large areas were outlined heavily in pencil. Substitute names had been scrawled in: “Summerland” for the area of Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana; “Industrial Park” for Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky and Tennessee; “Port Complex” for the Carolinas and Virginia; “Military Training” for the southwest, and also for Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. The Dakotas, Montana and Wyoming were marked “Prison Area.”

  And across the entire map Macklin had written “AOE—America of Enlightenment.”

  “This is the grand scheme,” he told her. “But to make it come true, we have to destroy the people who don’t think like us. We have to wipe out the mark of Cain.” He turned the map around and grazed the nails across it. “We have to stamp it out so we can forget what happened and put it behind us. But we’ve got to get ready for the Russians, too! They’re going to be dropping paratroopers and landing invasion barges. They think we’re dead and finished, but they’re wrong.” He leaned forward, the nails digging into the scarred desktop. “We’ll pay them back. We’ll pay the bastards back a thousand times!”

  He blinked. The Shadow Soldier was smiling thinly, his face streaked with camouflage paint under the brow of his helmet. Macklin’s heart was hammering, and he had to wait for it to settle down before he could speak again. “They don’t see the grand scheme,” he said quietly. “The AOE has almost five thousand soldiers now. We have to move to survive, and we have to take what we need. We’re not farmers—we’re warriors! That’s why I need you, Sheila.”

  “Need me? For what?”

  “You get around. You hear things. You know most of the other RLs. I want you to find out whom I can trust among my officers—and who needs to be disposed of. Like I say, I don’t trust Hewlitt, Oldfield or Vann, but it’s nothing I can prove before a court-martial. And the cancer might run deep, very deep. They think that just because of this”—and he touched the black leather mask—“I’m not fit for command anymore. But this isn’t the mark of Cain. This is different. This’ll go away when the air gets clean again and the sun comes out. The mark of Cain won’t go away until we destroy it.” He angled his head to one side, watching her carefully. “For every name you can put on an execution list—and verify—I’ll give you a carton of cigarettes and two bottles of liquor. How about it?”

  It was a generous offer. She already had a name in mind; it started with an L and ended with a Y. But she didn’t know if Lawry was loyal or not. Anyway, she sure would like to see him in front of a firing squad—but only if she could smash his brains out first. She was about to answer when someone knocked at the door.

  “Colonel?” It was Roland Croninger’s voice. “I’ve got a couple of presents for you.”

  Macklin strode to the door and opened it. Outside, illuminated by the firelight, was the armored truck that Captain Croninger and the others had gone out in. And chained to the rear fender were two men, both bloody and battered, one on his knees and the other standing straight and staring defiantly.

  “We found them about twelve miles east, along Highway 6,” Roland said. He was wearing his long coat, with the hood pulled up over his head. An automatic rifle was slung over his shoulder, and at his waist was a holstered .45. The dirty bandages still covered most of his face, but growths protruded like gnarled knuckles through spaces between them. The firelight burned red in the lenses of his goggles. “There were four of them at first. They wanted to fight. Captain Braden bought it; we brought back his clothes and guns. Anyway, that’s what left of them.” Roland’s growth-knotted lips parted in a slick smile. “We decided to see if they could keep up with the truck.”

  “Have you questioned them?”

  “No, sir. We were saving that.”

  Macklin walked past him, down the carved staircase. Roland followed, and Sheila Fontana watched from the doorway.

  The soldiers who stood around the two men parted to make way for Colonel Macklin. He stood face to face with the prisoner who refused to fall in defeat, even though the man’s knees were shredded and he had a bullet wound in his left shoulder. “What’s your name?” Macklin asked him.

  The man closed his eyes. “The Savior is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside still waters, He restoreth my—”

  Macklin interrupted him with a swipe of the nail-studded palm across the side of his face.

  The man dropped to his knees, his slashed face lowered to the ground.

  Macklin prodded the second man in the side with his boot. “You. Up.”

  “My legs. Please. Oh, God… my legs.”

  “Get up!”

  The prisoner struggled to his feet. Blood streamed down both his legs. He looked at Macklin through horrified, dazed eyes. “Please,” he begged. “Give me something for the pain… please…”

  “You give me information first. What’s your name?”

  The man blinked. “Brother Gary,” he said. “Gary Cates.”

  “That’s good, Gary.” Macklin patted his shoulder with his left hand. “Now: Where were you going?”

  “Don’t tell him anything!” the man on the ground shouted. “Don’t tell the heathen!”

  “You want to be a good boy, don’t you, Gary?” Macklin asked, his masked face about four inches away from Cates’s. “You want something to take your mind off the pain, don’t you? Tell me what I want to know.”

  “Don’t… don’t…” the other man sobbed.

  “It’s over for you,” Macklin stated. “It’s finished. There’s no need to make things more difficult than they have to be. Isn’t that right, Gary? I’ll ask you once more: Where were you going?”

  Cates hunched his shoulders, as if afraid he might be struck down from above. He shivered, and then he said, “We were… trying to catch up with them. Brother Ray got shot. He couldn’t make it on his own. I didn’t want to leave him. Brother Nick’s eyes were burned, and he was blind. The Savior says to leave the wounded… but they were my friends.”

  “The Savior? Who’s that?”

  “Him. The Savior. The true Lord and Master. He leads the American Allegiance. That’s who we were trying to catch up with.”

  “No…” the other man said. “Please… don’t tell…”

  “The American Allegiance,” Macklin repeated. He’d heard of them before, from wanderers who’d joined the AOE’s fold. They were led, as he understood it, by an ex-minister from California who had had a cable television program. Macklin had been looking forward to meeting him. “So he calls himself the Savior? How many are traveling with him, and where are they headed?”

  The fallen man sat up on his knees and began shrieking crazily, “The Savior is my shepherd, I shall not want! He maketh me to lie down in green pas—” He heard the click of Roland’s .45 as its barrel pressed against his skull.

  Roland did not hesitate. He squeezed the trigger.

  The noise of the gun made Sheila jump. The man toppled over.

  “Gary?” Macklin asked. Cates was staring down at the corpse, his eyes wide and one corner of his mouth twitching in a hysterical grin. “How many are traveling with the Savior, and where are they headed?”

  “Uh… uh… uh,” Cates stammered. “Uh… uh… three thousand,” he managed to say. “Maybe four. I don’t know for sure.”

  “They have armored vehicles?” Roland inquired. “Automatic weapons? Grenades?”

  “All those. We found an Army supply center up in South Dakota. There were trucks, armored cars, machine guns, flamethrowers, grenades… everything, for the taking. Even… six tanks and crates of heavy ammunition.”

  Colonel Macklin and Roland looked at each other. The same thought flashed through their minds: Six tanks and crates of heavy ammunition.

  “What kind of tanks?” The blood was pounding through Macklin’s veins.

  “I don’t know. Big tanks, with big guns. B
ut one of them wouldn’t run right from the first. We left three others, because they broke down and the mechanics couldn’t get them started again.”

  “So they’ve still got two?”

  Cates nodded. He lowered his head in shame, could feel the Savior’s eyes burning on the back of his neck. The Savior had three commandments: Disobey and Die; To Kill Is Merciful; and Love Me.

  “All right, Gary.” Macklin traced the other man’s jawline with his finger. “Where are they going?” Cates mumbled something, and Macklin wrenched his head up. “I didn’t hear you.”

  Cates’s gaze skittered to the .45 Roland was holding, then back to the black-masked face with its single, cold blue eye. “To West Virginia,” he said. “They’re going to West Virginia. A place called Warwick Mountain. I don’t know exactly where it is.”

  “West Virginia? Why there?”

  “Because—” He trembled; he could feel the man with the bandaged face and the .45 just aching to kill him. “If I tell you, will you let me live?” he asked Macklin.

  “We won’t kill you,” the colonel promised. “Tell me, Gary. Tell me.”

  “They’re going to West Virginia… because God lives there,” the other man said, and his face folded with agony at betraying the Savior. “God lives on top of Warwick Mountain. Brother Timothy saw God up there, a long time ago. God showed him the black box and the silver key and told him how the world will end. And now Brother Timothy’s leading the Savior to find God.”

  Macklin paused for a few seconds. Then he laughed out loud, its sound like the grunting of an animal. When he’d stopped laughing, he grasped the collar of Cates’s shirt with his left hand and pressed the nails of his right against the man’s cheek. “You’re not among crazy religious fanatics now, my friend. You’re among warriors. So stop the bullshitting and tell me the truth. Now.”

  “I swear it! I swear it!” Tears rolled from Cates’s eyes and through the grime on his face. “God lives on Warwick Mountain! Brother Timothy’s leading the Savior to find him! I swear it!”