The young man’s eyes found his. “Oh, yes,” he said. “You’d be in charge, wouldn’t you?”
“I asked you a question.”
“I’ve brought you something.” The young man suddenly tossed his present toward Macklin’s desk, and at once two guards were sticking rifle barrels in his face. Macklin cringed, had a mental image of a bomb ripping him apart and started to dive to the floor—but the package hit the desktop and came open.
What was inside rolled over his maps of Missouri.
Macklin was silent, staring at the five ears of corn. Roland crossed the room and picked one of them up, and a couple of the other officers crowded around as well.
“Get those out of my face,” the young man told the guards, but they hesitated until Roland ordered them to lower their rifles.
“Where’d you get these?” Roland demanded. He could still smell the dirt on the ear of corn in his hand.
“You’ve asked me enough questions. Now it’s my turn. How many men are out there?” He nodded toward the trailer’s wall, beyond which sprawled the camp and its dozens of bonfires. Neither Roland nor the colonel answered him. “If you’re going to play games with me,” the stranger said, smiling thinly, “I’ll take my toys and go home. You don’t really want me to do that, do you?”
It was Colonel Macklin who finally broke the silence. “We’ve… got about three thousand. We lost a lot of soldiers back in Nebraska.”
“All those three thousand are able-bodied men?”
“Who are you?” Macklin asked. He was very cold, and he noted Captain Carr blowing into his hands to warm them.
“Are those three thousand able to fight?”
“No. We’ve got about four hundred sick or wounded. And we’re carrying maybe a thousand women and children.”
“So you’ve only got sixteen hundred soldiers?” The young man clenched the chair’s armrests. Macklin saw something change about him, something almost imperceptible—and then he realized the young man’s left eye was turning brown. “I thought this was an army, not a boy scout troop!”
“You’re talking to officers of the Army of Excellence,” Roland said, quietly but menacingly. “I don’t give a shit who you—” And then he saw the brown eye, too, and his throat seized up.
“Some great army!” the other man sneered. “Fucking great!” His complexion was reddening, and his jowls seemed to be swelling up. “You’ve got a few guns and trucks, and you think you’re soldiers? You’re shit!” He almost screamed it, and the single blue eye bled pallid gray. “What’s your rank?” he asked Macklin.
Everyone was silent, because they’d seen, too. And then Alvin Mangrim, smiling and cheerful and already in love with the stranger, said, “He’s a colonel!”
“A colonel,” the stranger echoed. “Well, Colonel, I think the time has come for the Army of Excellence to be led by a five-star general.” A streak of black rippled through his hair.
Alvin Mangrim laughed and clapped his hands.
“What are you feeding your sixteen hundred soldiers?” The stranger stood up, and the men around Macklin’s desk retreated, bumping into one another. He snapped his fingers when Macklin didn’t reply fast enough. “Speak!”
Macklin was dumbfounded. No one but the Cong guards at the prison camp a lifetime ago had ever dared to speak to him like this. Ordinarily he would have slashed the offender to shreds for this kind of disrespect, but he could not argue with a man who had a face like a molting chameleon and wore a short-sleeved shirt when others were shivering in fleece-lined overcoats. He felt suddenly weakened, as if this young stranger was sucking the energy and willpower right out of him. The stranger commanded his attention like a magnet, and his presence filled the room with waves of cold that had begun to crisscross like frigid tides. He looked around for some kind of help from the others but saw that they were mesmerized and impotent, too—and even Roland had backed away, his fists clenched at his sides.
The young stranger lowered his head. He remained that way for about thirty seconds. When he lifted his face again, it was pleasant, and both eyes were blue once more. But the black streak remained in his curly brown hair. “I’m sorry,” he said, with a disarming smile. “I’m not myself today. Really, though, I’d like to know: What are you feeding your troops?”
“We… we captured some canned food… from the American Allegiance,” Macklin said at last. “Some cases of canned soup and stew… some canned vegetables and fruit.”
“How long will that supply last? A week? Two weeks?”
“We’re marching east,” Roland told him, getting himself under control. “To West Virginia. We’ll raid other settlements on the way.”
“To West Virginia? What’s in West Virginia?”
“A mountain… where God lives,” Roland said. “The black box and the silver key. Brother Timothy’s going to lead us.” Brother Timothy had been tough, but he’d cracked under Roland’s attentions in the black trailer. According to Brother Timothy, God had a silver key that he had inserted into a black box, and a doorway had opened in solid stone. Within Warwick Mountain—so Brother Timothy had said—were corridors and electric lights and humming machines that made spools of tape spin around, and the machines had spoken to God, reading off numbers and facts that had been way over Brother Timothy’s head. And the more Roland had thought about that story, the more he’d come to believe a very interesting thing: that the man who called himself God had shown Brother Timothy a roomful of mainframe computers still hooked up to a power source.
And if there were mainframe computers still in operation under Warwick Mountain, West Virginia, Roland wanted to find out why they were there, what information they held—and why somebody had made sure they’d keep functioning even after a total nuclear holocaust.
“A mountain where God lives,” the stranger repeated. “Well. I’d like to see that mountain myself.” He blinked, and his right eye was green.
No one moved, not even the guards with the rifles.
“Look at the corn,” the stranger urged. “Smell it. It’s fresh, picked right off the stalk a couple of days ago. I know where there’s a whole field of corn growing—and pretty soon there’ll be apple trees growing there, too. Hundreds of them. How long has it been since any of you tasted an apple? Or cornbread? Or smelled corn frying in a pan?” His gaze crept around the circle of men. “I’ll bet way too long.”
“Where?” Macklin’s mouth was watering. “Where’s the field?”
“Oh… about a hundred and twenty miles south of here. In a little town called Mary’s Rest. They’ve got a spring there, too. You can fill up your bottles and kegs with water that tastes like sunshine.” His eyes of different colors glinted, and he walked to the edge of Macklin’s desk. “There’s a girl who lives in that town,” the young man said; he planted his palms on the desk and leaned forward. “Her name is Swan. I’d like you to meet her. Because she’s the one who made that corn grow out of dead earth, and she planted apple seeds, and they’re going to grow, too.” He grinned, but there was rage in it, and dark pigment rose like a birthmark across his cheek. “She can make crops grow. I’ve seen what she can do. And if you had her—then you could feed your army while everybody else starved. Do you see what I mean?”
Macklin shivered from the cold that came off the man’s body, but he couldn’t look away from those gleaming eyes. “Why… are you telling me this? What’s in it for you?”
“Oh… let’s just say I want to be on the winning team.” The dark pigment disappeared.
“We’re marching to Warwick Mountain,” Roland contended. “We can’t go a hundred and twenty miles out of our way—”
“The mountain will wait,” the stranger said softly, still staring at Macklin. “First I’ll take you to get the girl. Then you can go find God, or Samson and Delilah, if you want to. But first the girl—and the food.”
“Yes.” Macklin nodded, his eyes glazed and his jaw sagging. “Yes. First the girl and the food.”
&nb
sp; The young man smiled, and slowly his eyes became the same shade of blue. He was feeling so much better now, so much stronger. Fit as a fiddle! he thought. Maybe it was being here, among people he sensed had the right ideas. Yes, war was a good thing! It trimmed the population and made sure only the strong survived, so the next generation would be better. He’d always been an advocate of the humane nature of war. Maybe he was also feeling stronger because he was away from that girl. That damned little bitch was tormenting those poor souls in Mary’s Rest, making them believe their lives were worth living again. And that sort of deception would not be tolerated.
He picked up the map of Missouri with his left hand and held it up before him while his right hand snaked down behind it. Roland saw a blue wisp of smoke rise and smelled a burning candle. And then a scorched circle began to appear on the map, about a hundred and twenty miles south of their present position. When the circle was complete, the stranger let the map slide back onto the desk in front of Macklin; his right hand was clenched into a fist, and a haze of smoke hung around it.
“That’s where we’re going,” he said.
Alvin Mangrim beamed like a happy child. “Right on, bro!”
For the first time in his life, Macklin felt faint. Something had spun out of control; the gears of the great war machine that was the Army of Excellence had begun to turn of their own accord. He realized in that moment that he didn’t really care about the Mark of Cain, or about purifying the human race, or about rebuilding to fight the Russians. All that had been what he’d told the others, to make them believe the AOE had a higher cause. And make himself believe it, too.
Now he knew all he’d ever wanted was to be feared and respected again, like he’d been when he was a younger man fighting in foreign fields, before his reflexes had slowed down. He’d wanted people to call him “sir” and not have a smirk in their eyes when they did it. He wanted to be somebody again, instead of a drone locked in a flabby bag of bones and dreaming of the past.
He realized he’d crossed a point of no return somewhere along the current of time that had swept him and Roland Croninger out of Earth House. There was no going back now—no going back ever.
But part of him, deep inside, suddenly screamed and cowered in a dark hole, waiting for something fearsome to come lift the lid and offer him food.
“Who are you?” he whispered.
The stranger leaned forward until his face was only inches from Macklin’s. Deep in the man’s eyes, Macklin thought he saw slits of scarlet.
The stranger said, “You can call me… Friend.”
Seventy-nine
Swan’s decision
“They’re going to come,” Sister said. “I know they are. My question is: What are we going to do when they get here?”
“We shoots their damned heads off!” a skinny black man said, standing up from the rough-hewn bench. “Yessir! We gots us enough guns to make ’em turn tail!”
“Right!” another man agreed, on the other side of the church. “We’re not gonna let the bastards come in here and take whatever they want!”
There was a murmur of angry agreement in the crowd of more than a hundred people who’d jammed into the half-built church, but many others shouted a dissent. “Listen!” a woman said, rising from her seat. “If what she says is true, and there are a couple of thousand soldiers on the way here, we’re crazy to think we can stand up to them! We’ve got to pack up whatever we can carry and get—”
“No!” a gray-bearded man thundered from the next row. He stood up, his face streaked with burn scars and livid with rage. “No, by God! We stay here, where our homes are! Mary’s Rest didn’t used to be worth spit on a griddle, but look at it now! Hell, we’ve got a town here! We’re buildin’ things back!” He looked around at the crowd, his eyes dark and furious. About eight feet over his head oil lamps hung from the exposed rafters and cast a muted golden light over the assembly; smoke from the lanterns rose up into the night, because there was no roof yet. “I got a shotgun that says me and my wife are gonna stay right here,” he continued. “And we’re gonna die here, if we have to. We ain’t runnin’ from nobody no more!”
“Wait a minute! Just everybody hold on, now!” A big-boned man in a denim jacket and khaki trousers stood up. “What’s everybody goin’ crazy for? This woman tacks up these things”—he held up one of the crudely printed bulletin sheets that said Emergency Meeting Tonight! Everybody Come!—“and we all start jabberin’ like a bunch of idiots! So she stands up there at the front and says some kind of damned army is gonna be marchin’ through here in…” He glanced at Sister. “How long did you say it’d be?”
“I don’t know. Three or four days, maybe. They’ve got trucks and cars, and they’re going to be moving fast once they get started.”
“Uh-huh. Well, you get up there and start on about an army comin’ this way, and we all shit our britches. How do you know that? And what are they after? I mean, if they want to fight a war, they sure could find a better place! We’re all Americans here, not Russkys!”
“What’s your name?” Sister asked him.
“Bud Royce. That is, Captain Bud Royce, ex-Arkansas National Guard. See, I know a little about armies myself.”
“Good. Captain Royce, I’ll tell you exactly what they’re after—our crops. And our water, too, most likely. I can’t tell you how I know so you’d understand it, but I do know they’re coming, and they’re going to tear Mary’s Rest to the ground.” She held the leather satchel, and within it was the glass circle that had taken her dreamwalking on a savage landscape where the skeleton on his mount of bones held sway. She looked at Swan, who sat beside Josh in the front row and was listening carefully, and then back to Bud Royce. “Just believe it. They’re going to be here soon, and we’d better decide right now what to do.”
“We fight!” a man at the back shouted.
“How can we fight?” an old man who supported himself on a cane asked in a quavering voice. “We can’t stand up against an army. We’d be fools to even try such a thing!”
“We’d be damned cowards if we didn’t!” a woman said, over on the left.
“Yeah, but better live cowards than dead heroes,” a young, bearded man sitting behind Josh contended. “I’m getting out!”
“That’s a crock of buttered bullshit!” Anna McClay roared, standing up from her bench. She put her hands on her wide hips and regarded the crowd, her upper lip curled in a sneer. “God A’mighty, what’s the point of livin’ if you don’t fight for what you hold dear? We work our butts to the bone cleanin’ this town up and buildin’ this church back, and we’re gonna run at the first sniff of real trouble?” She grunted and shook her head in disgust. “I remember what Mary’s Rest used to be—and most of you folks do, too. But I see what it is now, and what it can be! If we were to run, where would we go? Some other hole in the ground? And what happens when that damned army decides to come marchin’ in our direction again? I say if we run once, we’re as good as dead anyway—so we might as well go down fightin’!”
“Yeah! That’s what I say, too!” Mr. Polowsky added.
“I’ve got a wife and kids!” Vulcevic said, his face stricken with fear. “I don’t want to die, and I don’t want them to die either! I don’t know anything about fighting!”
“It’s time you learned, then!” Paul Thorson stood up and walked along the aisle to the front. “Listen,” he said, standing beside Sister, “we all know the score, don’t we? We know where we used to be, and we know where we are now! If we give up Mary’s Rest without a fight, we’ll all be wanderers again, and we’ll know we didn’t have the guts to even try to keep it! I, for one, am pretty damned lazy. I don’t want to go on the road again—and so I’m sticking right here.”
As the people shouted out their opinions Sister looked at Paul and smiled faintly. “What’s this? Another layer on the shitcake?”
“No,” he said, his eyes electric blue and steely. “I believe my cake’s about baked, don’t you?”
“Yes, I guess it is.” She loved Paul like a brother, and she’d never been prouder of him. And she’d already made her own decision—to stay and fight while Josh got Swan to safety, a plan that Swan didn’t yet know about.
Swan was listening to the tumult of voices, and in her mind was something she knew she should stand up and say. But there were so many people crowded in there, and she was still shy about speaking before strangers. Still, the thought was important—and she knew she had to speak her mind before the chance passed. She drew a deep breath and stood up. “Excuse me,” she said, but her voice was drowned out by the cacophony. She walked to the front, stood beside Paul and faced the crowd. Her heart was fluttering like a little bird, and her voice trembled as she said, just a little louder, “Excuse me. I want to—”
The tumult started to die down almost at once. In another few seconds there was silence but for the wail of the wind around the walls and the crying of an infant at the back of the church.
Swan looked out at all of them. They were waiting for her to speak. She was the center of attention, and it made her feel as if ants were running up and down her backbone. At the back of the church, more people pressed around the door, and maybe two hundred others were assembled out in the road, hearing what was said as it was passed back through the crowd. All eyes were on Swan, and she thought for a second that her throat had closed up. “Excuse me,” she managed, “but I’d like to say something.” She hesitated, trying to arrange her thoughts. “It… it seems to me,” she began tentatively, “that we’re all worried about whether we’re going to be able to fight the soldiers off or not… and that’s the wrong thing to be thinking of. If we have to fight them here, in Mary’s Rest, we’re going to lose. And if we run, and leave everything to them, they’ll destroy it all—because that’s what armies do.” She saw Robin standing over on the right side of the church, surrounded by several of his highwaymen. Their eyes met and held for a few seconds. “We can’t win if we fight,” Swan continued, “and we can’t win if we run, either. So it seems to me that what we should be doing is thinking about stopping them from getting here.”
1987 - Swan Song v4 Page 78
