1987 - Swan Song v4

by Robert McCammon

  Ninety-one

  Realm of God

  They came at first light. Josh was awakened by the banging of a rifle butt on the truck’s rear door, and he got up off the metal floor, his bones aching, to move back with Robin and Brother Timothy.

  The door was unbolted and rolled up on its casters.

  A blond man with ebony eyes stood looking in, flanked by two soldiers with rifles. He wore an Army of Excellence uniform with epaulets and what appeared to be Nazi medals and insignia on his chest. “Good morning, all!” he said cheerfully, and as soon as he spoke both Josh and Robin knew who he was. “How did we sleep last night?”

  “Cold,” Josh answered tersely.

  “We’ll have a heater for you on the plantation, Sambo.” His gaze shifted. “Brother Timothy? Come out, please.” He crooked an inviting finger.

  Brother Timothy cringed, and the two soldiers came in to haul him out. Josh started to jump one of them, but a rifle barrel was thrust at him and the moment passed. He saw two Jeeps parked nearby, their engines rumbling. In one of them were three people: a driver, Colonel Macklin and a soldier with a machine gun; in the other was also a driver, another armed soldier, a slumped-over figure wearing a heavy coat and hood—and Swan and Sister, both thin and wan-looking.

  “Swan!” Robin shouted, stepping toward the opening.

  She saw him, too, and cried out, “Robin!” as she rose from her seat. The soldier grabbed her arm and pulled her down again.

  One of the guards shoved Robin back. He rushed at the man, his face contorted with rage, and the soldier lifted his rifle butt to smash Robin’s skull. Josh suddenly lunged out and caught the boy, holding him as he thrashed. The soldier spat on the floor, and when he stepped down from the truck the rear door was slid into place and bolted once more.

  “Hey, you bastard!” Josh shouted, peering through one of the thirty-seven punctures. “Hey! I’m talking to you, creep-show!” He realized he was bellowing in his old wrestler’s voice.

  Friend shoved Brother Timothy toward the first Jeep and then turned regally.

  “What do you need Swan and Sister for? Where are you taking them?”

  “We’re all going up Warwick Mountain to meet God,” he answered. “The road’s not good enough for anything heavier than the Jeeps. That satisfy the old negroid curiosity?”

  “You don’t need them! Why don’t you leave them here?”

  Friend smiled vacantly and strolled closer. “Oh, they’re too valuable for that. Suppose some crafty old fox decided he wanted a little more power and snatched them away while we were gone? That wouldn’t do.” He started to return to the Jeep.

  “Hey! Wait!” Josh called, but the man with the scarlet eye was already getting into the Jeep beside Brother Timothy. The two vehicles moved away and out of sight.

  “Now what?” Robin asked him, still seething. “Do we just sit here?”

  Josh didn’t answer. He was thinking of something Brother Timothy had said: “The last of the Good must die with the Evil. Must die, so the world can be reborn. You must die. And you. And me. And even Swan.”

  “Swan won’t come back,” Robin said tonelessly. “Neither will Sister. You know that, don’t you?”

  “No, I don’t.” “He’ll pray to the machine that calls down the talons of Heaven,” he remembered Brother Timothy saying. “Prepare yourselves for the final hour.”

  “I love her, Josh,” Robin said. He grasped Josh’s arm tightly. “We’ve got to get out of here! We’ve got to stop… whatever it is that’s going to happen!”

  Josh pulled free. He walked to the far corner of the cell and looked down.

  On the floor beside Brother Timothy’s bucket was the tin cup, with its sharp metal handle.

  He picked it up and touched the ragged edge.

  It was too small and awkward to use as a weapon, and Josh had already dismissed that possibility. But he was thinking of an old wrestling trick, something that was done with a hidden razor when the promoter wanted more “juice.” It was a common practice, and it always made the violence look more real.

  Now it might give the illusion of something else, as well.

  He started to work.

  Robin’s eyes widened. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Be quiet,” Josh cautioned. “Just get ready to start yelling when I say so.”

  The two Jeeps were about a quarter mile away, slowly climbing a winding, snow-and rain-slick mountain road. At one time the road had been paved, but the concrete had cracked and slid apart, and underneath was a layer of mud. The Jeeps’ tires slipped, and the vehicles fishtailed as the engines roared for traction. In the second Jeep, Sister gripped Swan’s hand. The hooded figure sitting in the front suddenly turned his head toward them—and they had a heart-stopping glimpse of his deathly yellow, cratered face. The goggled eyes lingered on Swan.

  The drivers fought for every foot. To the right stood a low steel guard rail, and just beyond it was a rocky drop-off that fell seventy feet into a wooded ravine. Still the road ascended as the broken plates of concrete shifted beneath the Jeeps’ wheels.

  The road curved to the left and was blocked by an eight-foot-high chain link fence and gate. On the gate was a metal sign, surprisingly free of corrosion: WARWICK COAL MINING COMPANY. TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED. Ten feet beyond the fence was a brick enclosure where a guard might once have stood duty. A sturdy-looking chain and padlock secured the gate, and Friend said, “Get that thing open” to the soldier with the machine gun. The man got out, walked to the gate and reached out to test the padlock before he blasted it off.

  There was a sizzling like fat being fried in a pan. The soldier’s legs began to boogie, with his hand sealed to the chain and his face bleached and grimacing. The machine gun chattered on its own, spraying bullets into the ground. His clothes and hair smoked, his face taking on a blue cast; then the muscle tension snapped the soldier backward, and he fell, still jerking and writhing, to the ground.

  The smell of scorched flesh and electricity wafted through the air. Friend whirled around and clamped his hand to Brother Timothy’s throat. “Why didn’t you say it was an electric fence?” he bellowed.

  “I… I didn’t know! It was broken open the last time! God must’ve fixed it!”

  Friend almost set him afire, but he could see that Brother Timothy was telling the truth. The electrified fence also told him that the power source, wherever it was, was still active. He released the man, got out of the Jeep and strode to the gate.

  He reached through the chain link mesh and grasped the padlock. His fingers worked at it, trying to break it open. Both Swan and Sister saw his sleeve beginning to smoke, the flesh of his hand getting as soft as used chewing gum. The padlock resisted him, and he could feel the little bitch watching and sucking all the strength out of him. In a rage, he gripped the mesh with the fingers of both hands and wrenched at the gate like a child trying to break into a locked playground. Sparks popped and flew. For an instant he was outlined in an electric-blue glow, his Army of Excellence uniform smoking and charring, the shoulder epaulets bursting into flame. Then the gate’s hinges gave way, and Friend hurled the gate aside.

  “Didn’t think I could, did you?” he shouted at Swan. His face had gone waxy, most of his hair and his eyebrows singed away. Her expression remained placid, and he knew it was a good thing she was going to a prison camp, because the bitch would have to be broken under a whip before she learned respect.

  He had to concentrate harder than usual to get his oozing hands solid again. His epaulets were still burning, and he tore them away before he retrieved the dead soldier’s machine gun and returned to the first Jeep. “Let’s go,” he ordered. Two fingers on his right hand remained scorched and twisted, and they would not reform.

  The two Jeeps moved through the opening and continued up the mountain road, winding between dense stands of lifeless pines and hardwood trees.

  They came to a second brick guard’s station, where a rusted sign co
mmanded Present Identification. Atop the structure was what appeared to be a small videotape camera.

  “They had pretty tight security up here for a coal mine,” Sister observed, and Roland Croninger growled, “No talking!”

  The road emerged from the forest into a clearing; there was a paved parking lot, empty of cars, and beyond it stood a complex of one-story brick buildings and a larger, aluminum-roofed structure built right into the mountainside. Warwick Mountain continued upward about another two hundred feet, covered with dead trees and boulders, and at its peak Sister saw three rusted towers—antennas, she realized—that disappeared in the swirling gray clouds.

  “Stop,” Friend said. The driver obeyed, and a second later the other Jeep halted. He sat looking around the complex for a moment, his eyes narrowed and his senses questing. There was no movement, no life as far as he could see. The chilly wind blew across the parking lot, and thunder rumbled in the clouds. A black drizzle began to fall again. Friend said, “Get out” to Brother Timothy.

  “What?”

  “Get out,” Friend repeated. “Walk ahead of us, and start calling him. Go on!”

  Brother Timothy climbed out of the Jeep and started walking across the parking lot through the black rain. “God!” he shouted, and his voice echoed off the walls of the large metal-roofed building. “It’s Timothy! I’ve come back to you!”

  Friend got out and followed behind him a few yards, the machine gun resting on his hip.

  “God! Where are you? I’ve come back!”

  “Keep going,” Friend told him, and the other man walked forward with the rain beating in his face.

  Sister had been waiting for the right moment. Everyone’s attention was fixed on the two men. The woods lay about thirty yards away, and if she could keep the rest of them busy, Swan might have a chance to make it; they wouldn’t kill her, and if she could reach the woods, Swan might be able to escape. She squeezed Swan’s hand, whispered, “Get ready” and tensed to slam her fist into the face of the guard at her side.

  Brother Timothy shouted joyously, “There he is!”

  She looked up. High above, a figure stood on the sloping aluminum roof.

  Brother Timothy fell to his knees, his hands upraised and his face torn between terror and rapture. “God!” he called. “It’s the final hour! Evil’s won! Cleanse the world, God! Call down the talons of Hea—”

  Machine gun bullets ripped across his back. He fell forward, his body still kneeling in an attitude of prayer.

  Friend swung the smoking barrel up toward the roof. “Come down!” he ordered.

  The figure stood motionlessly but for the billowing of a long, ragged coat around his thin body.

  “I’ll tell you once more,” Friend warned, “and then we’ll see what color God’s blood is.”

  Still the figure hesitated. Swan thought the man with the scarlet eye was going to shoot—but then the figure on the roof walked over near the edge, lifted a hatch and began to descend a metal-runged ladder bolted to the building’s wall.

  He reached the ground and walked to Brother Timothy, where he bent to examine the dead man’s features. Friend heard him mutter something, and ‘God’ shook his gray-maned head in disgust. Then he stood up again, approached Friend and stopped about two feet away. Above the duty, tangled mat of his gray beard, the man’s eyes were sunken deep in purple craters, his flesh ivory and covered with intersecting cracks and wrinkles. A brown-ridged scar sliced across his right cheek, narrowly missing the eye, cutting through the thick eyebrow and up into the hairline, where it divided into a network of scars. His left hand, dangling from the folds of his overcoat, was brown and withered to the size of a child’s.

  “You bastard,” he said, and with his right hand he slapped Friend across the face.

  “Help!” Robin Oakes was shouting. “Somebody help! He’s killing himself!”

  Sergeant Shitpants emerged from a nearby trailer, cocked his .45 automatic and ran through the rain to the truck. Another guard with a rifle came from a different direction, and a third soldier followed.

  “Hurry!” Robin yelled frantically, looking through one of the punctures. “Somebody help him!”

  Sergeant Shitpants thrust the pistol’s barrel up at Robin’s face. “What’s going on?”

  “It’s Josh! He’s trying to kill himself! Open the door!”

  “Right! Fuck that!”

  “He’s cut his wrists, you dumb-ass!” Robin told him. “He’s bleeding all over the floor in here!”

  “That trick was old in silent movies, you little prick!”

  Robin pushed three fingers through one of the holes, and Sergeant Shitpants saw the crimson smear of blood all over them.

  “He’s slashed his wrists with a cup’s handle!” Robin said. “If you don’t help him, he’s going to bleed to death!”

  “Let the nigger die, then!” the guard with the rifle said.

  “Shut up!” Sergeant Shitpants was trying to figure out what he should do. He knew the consequences if anything happened to the prisoners. Colonel Macklin and Captain Croninger were bad enough, but the new commander would cut off his balls and use them as hood ornaments.

  “Help him!” Robin shouted. “Don’t just stand there!”

  “Step back from the door!” the other man ordered. “Go on! Get back, and if you make one move I don’t like, I swear to God you’re dead meat!”

  Robin retreated. The door was unbolted and shoved upward about eight inches.

  “Throw it out! The cup! Throw the damned thing out!”

  A bloody tin cup was slid through the opening. The sergeant picked it up, felt the ragged metal edge and tasted the blood to make sure it was real. It was. “Damn it!” he raged, and he pushed the door up the rest of the way.

  Robin stood at the back of the truck, away from the door. Curled on the floor near him was the body of Josh Hutchins, lying on his right side with his face averted. Sergeant Shitpants climbed into the truck, his gun aimed at Robin’s head. The guard with the rifle climbed up as well, and the third man stayed on the ground with his pistol unholstered and ready. “Stay back and keep both hands up!” Sergeant Shitpants warned Robin as he approached the black man’s body.

  Blood gleamed on the floor. The sergeant saw blood all over the black man’s clothes, and he reached down to touch one outthrust wrist; his own fingers came away bloody. “Jesus!” he said, realizing he was tailbone deep in trouble. He holstered his .45 and tried to turn the man over, but Josh was way too heavy for him. “Help me move him!” he told Robin, and the boy bent down to grasp Josh’s other arm.

  Josh gave a low, guttural groan.

  And two things happened at once: Robin picked up the bucket of waste lying beside Josh’s arm and hurled its contents into the face of the guard with the rifle, and Josh’s body came to life, his right fist smashing into Sergeant Shitpants’ jaw and snapping it crooked. The man gave a scream as his teeth tore into his tongue, and then Josh was wrenching the .45 out of its holster.

  The blinded guard fired his rifle, and the bullet sang past Robin’s head as the boy lunged at him, grabbing the rifle and kicking him in the groin. The third soldier fired at Josh, but the bullet hit Sergeant Shitpants in the back and drove him into Josh like a shield. Josh wiped the blood out of his eyes and shot at the soldier, but the man was already running through the rain shouting for help.

  Robin kicked the guard again, tumbling him out of the truck to the ground. Josh knew they would only have a minute or so before the place was swarming with soldiers, and he started digging through Sergeant Shitpants’ pockets, looking for the truck’s key. Blood was streaming down his face from three slashes across his forehead, inflicted with the ragged edge of metal; he’d smeared his wrists with blood and gotten it all over his clothes to make it appear as if he’d cut his veins. In the wrestling ring, a small sliver of razor blade hidden in a bandage had often been drawn across the forehead to create a superficial but nasty-looking wound, and in this case the gore was
needed for a similarly theatrical purpose.

  Two soldiers were running toward the truck. Robin took aim and shot one of them down, but the other fell onto his stomach and crawled under a trailer. Josh couldn’t find a key. “Look in the ignition!” he shouted, and he fired shots at random as Robin jumped to the ground and ran around to the truck’s cab.

  He opened the door and reached up to the dashboard, his fingers searching. There was no key in the ignition.

  The soldier under the trailer squeezed off two shots that ricocheted dangerously around Josh, who flung himself flat. Another soldier opened up with an automatic rifle, over to the left. The air turned hot above Josh’s head, and he heard bullets whack off the inside of the truck like hammers beating garbage can lids.

  Robin searched under the seat and found nothing but empty cartridges. He opened the glove compartment. There! Inside was a tarnished key and a snub-nose .38. He fit the key into the ignition, turned it and jammed his foot down on the accelerator. The engine coughed and racketed, then roared to Me, the entire truck quaking. He gaped at the gearshift. Shit! he thought; one thing he’d forgotten to tell Josh while they were planning their escape was that his experience in driving had been very limited. Still, he knew you had to press the clutch down to engage the gears. He did, and he forced the gearshift into first over the transmission’s objections. Then he put his foot to the floor on the accelerator and let up suddenly on the clutch.

  The truck shot forward as if it were rocket-powered. Josh was propelled to the edge of the truck’s bed, and he kept himself from flying out by grabbing the upraised track of metal on which the door slid up and down.

  Robin jammed the gearshift into second. The truck bucked like a wild stallion as it tore through the encampment, grazing a parked car and scattering a half-dozen soldiers who had been alerted by the noise. A bullet shattered the windshield and sent wasps of glass flying around Robin’s head and face, but he shielded his eyes and kept going.