Swan Song

by Robert R. McCammon

  The film stopped, the frame burning away on the screen. The red curtain that Sister Creep was still holding onto burst into flames, and she screamed and jerked her hands away. A wave of sickening heat swept through the theater, the walls drooling fire.

  “Tick tock tick tock!” the man’s voice continued, in a merry singsong rhythm. “Nothing ever stops the clock!”

  The ceiling blazed and buckled. Sister Creep shielded her head with her arms and staggered backward through the fiery curtains as he advanced on her. Streams of chocolate ran from the concession counter. She ran toward the door, and the thing behind her brayed, “Run! Run, you pig!”

  She was three strides out the door before it became a sheet of fire, and then she was running madly through the ruins of Forty-second Street. When she dared to look back, she saw the entire theater bellowing flame, the building’s roof imploding as if driven down by a brutal fist.

  She flung herself behind a block of stone as a storm of glass and bricks hurtled around her. It was all over in a few seconds, but Sister Creep stayed huddled up, shivering with terror, until all the bricks had stopped falling. She peered out from behind her shelter.

  Now the ruins of the theater were indistinguishable from any of the other piles of ash. The theater was gone, and so—thankfully— was the thing with the flaming hand.

  She touched the raw circle of flesh that ringed her throat, and her fingers came away bloody. It took another moment for her to grasp that the crucifix and chain were really gone. She couldn’t remember where she’d gotten it from, but it was something she’d been proud of. She’d thought that it protected her, too, and now she felt naked and defenseless.

  She knew she’d looked into the face of evil there in that cheap theater.

  The black rain was falling harder. Sister Creep curled up, her hand pressed to her bleeding throat, and she closed her eyes and prayed for death.

  Jesus Christ was not coming in His flying saucer after all, she realized. Judgment Day had destroyed the innocent in the same flames that killed the guilty, and the Rapture was a lunatic’s dream.

  A sob of anguish broke from her throat. She prayed, Please, Jesus, take me home, please, right now, this minute, please, please ...

  But when she opened her eyes the black rain was still falling.

  The wind was getting stronger, and now it carried a winter’s chill. She was drenched, sick to her stomach, and her teeth were chattering.

  Wearily, she sat up. Jesus was not coming today. She would have to die later, she decided. There was no use lying out here like a fool in the rain.

  One step, she thought. One step and then the next gets you where you’re going.

  Where that was, she didn’t know, but from now on she’d have to be very careful, because that evil thing with no face and all faces could be lurking anywhere. Anywhere. The rules had changed. The Promised Land was a boneyard, and Hell itself had broken through the earth’s surface.

  She had no idea what had caused such destruction, but a terrible thing occurred to her: What if everywhere was like this? She let the thought go before it burned into her brain, and she struggled to her feet.

  The wind staggered her. The rain was falling so heavily that she couldn’t see beyond four feet in any direction. She decided to go toward what she thought was north, because there might be a tree left to rest under in Central Park.

  Her back bowed against the elements, she started with one step.

  13

  “HOUSE FELL IN MAMA!” Josh Hutchins yelled as he struggled free of the dirt, rubble and pieces of snapped timbers that covered his back. “Twister’s done gone!” His mother didn’t answer, but he could hear her crying. “It’s all right, Mama! We’re gonna be ...”

  The memory of an Alabama tornado that had driven Josh, his sister and his mother into the basement of their home when he was seven years old suddenly broke and whirled apart. The cornfield, the burning spears and the tornado of fire came back to him with horrifying clarity, and he realized the crying woman was the little girl’s mother.

  It was dark. A weight still bore down on Josh, and as he fought against it a mound of rubble, mostly the dirt and broken wood, slid off him. He sat upright, his body throbbing with dull pain.

  His face felt funny—so tight it was about to rip. He lifted his fingers to touch his forehead, and a dozen blisters broke, the fluids oozing down his face. More blisters burst on his cheeks and jaw; he touched the flesh around his eyes and found they were swollen into slits. The pain was getting sharper, and his back felt as if it had been splashed with boiling water. Burned, he thought. Burned to hell and back. He smelled the odor of fried bacon, and he almost puked but he was too intent on finding out the extent of his injuries. At his right ear there was a different kind of pain. He gently touched it. His fingers grazed a stub of flesh and crusted blood where his ear had been. He remembered the explosion of the pumps, and he figured that a hot sliver of metal had sliced most of his ear clean off.

  I’m in fine shape, he thought, and he almost laughed out loud. Ready to take on the world! He knew that if he ever stepped into a wrestling ring again, he wouldn’t need a Frankenstein mask to resemble a monster.

  And then he did throw up, his body heaving and shuddering, the fried bacon smell thick in his nostrils. When his sickness had passed, he crawled away from the mess. Under his hands were loose dirt, timbers, broken glass, dented cans and cornstalks.

  He heard a man moaning, remembered PawPaw’s burning eyeballs, and figured that the man was lying somewhere to his right, though his ear on that side was clogged up. The woman’s sobbing would put her a few feet in front of him; the little girl, if she was still alive, was silent. The air was still warm, but at least it was breathable. Josh’s fingers closed on a wooden shaft, and he followed it to the end of a garden hoe. Digging into the dirt around him, he found a variety of objects: can after can, some of them broken open and leaking; a couple of melted things that might have once been plastic milk jugs; a hammer; some charred magazines and packs of cigarettes. The entire grocery store had caved in on top of them, spilling everything into PawPaw’s fallout shelter. And that’s surely what it was, Josh reasoned. The underground boys must have known he might need it someday.

  Josh tried to stand, but he bumped his head before he could straighten up from a crouch. He felt a ceiling of hard-packed dirt, planks and possibly hundreds of rough cornstalks jammed together about four and a half feet off the basement floor. Oh, Jesus! Josh thought. There must be tons of earth right over our heads! He figured they had nothing more than a pocket of air down here, and when that was gone ...

  “Stop crying, lady,” he said. “The old man’s hurt worse than you are.”

  She gasped, as if she hadn’t realized anyone else was alive.

  “Where’s the little girl? She okay?” Blisters popped on Josh’s lips.

  “Swan!” Darleen shouted. She searched for Sue Wanda through the dirt. “I can’t find her! Where’s my baby? Where’s Swan?” Then her left hand touched a small arm. It was still warm. “Here she is! Oh, God, she’s buried!” Darleen started digging frantically.

  Josh crawled to her side and made out the child’s body with his hands. But only her legs and left arm were buried; her face was free, and she was breathing. Josh got the child’s legs uncovered, and Darleen embraced her daughter. “Swan, you okay? Say somethin’, Swan! Come on now! Talk to Mama!” She shook the child until one of Swan’s hands came up and pushed weakly at her.

  “Quit.” Swan’s voice was a hoarse, slurred whisper. “Wanna sleep ... till we get there.”

  Josh crawled toward the man’s moaning. He found PawPaw curled up and half buried. Carefully, Josh dug him out. PawPaw’s hand caught in the shreds of Josh’s shirt, and the old man muttered something that Josh couldn’t understand. He said, “What?” and bent his head closer.

  “The sun,” PawPaw repeated. “Oh, Lord ... I saw the sun blow up.” He started muttering again, something about his bedroom s
lippers. Josh knew he couldn’t last much longer and went back to Darleen and Swan.

  The little girl was crying—a quiet, deeply wounded sound. “Shhhh,” Darleen said. “Shhhh, honey. They’re gonna find us. Don’t you worry. They’ll get us out of here.” She still didn’t fully grasp what had happened; everything was hazy and jumbled past the moment when Swan had pointed to the PawPaw’s sign on the interstate and said she was going to bust if she couldn’t go to the bathroom.

  “I can’t see, Mama,” Swan said listlessly.

  “We’re gonna be all right, honey. They’re gonna find us real ...” She’d reached up to smooth back her daughter’s hair and jerked her hand away. Her fingers had found stubble. “Oh, my God. Oh, Swan, oh, baby ...” She was afraid to touch her own hair and face, but she felt nothing more uncomfortable than the pain of a moderate sunburn. I’m okay, she told herself. And Swan’s okay, too. Just lost some hair, that’s all. We’re gonna be just fine!

  “Where’s PawPaw?” Swan asked. “Where’s the giant?” She had a toothache all over her body, and she smelled breakfast cooking.

  “I’m right here,” Josh answered. “The old man’s not too far away. We’re in the basement, and the whole place caved in on—”

  “We’re gonna get out!” Darleen interrupted. “It won’t be too long before somebody finds us!”

  “Lady, that might not be for a while. We’re going to have to settle down and save our air.”

  “Save our air?” Panic flared anew. “We’re breathin’ okay!”

  “Right now, yeah. I don’t know how much room we’ve got in here, but I figure the air’s going to get pretty tight. We might have to stay in here for ... for a long time,” he decided to say.

  “You’re crazy! Don’t you listen to him, honey. I’ll bet they’re comin’ to dig us out right this minute.” She began to rock Swan like an infant.

  “No, lady.” It was pointless to pretend. “I don’t think anybody’s going to dig us out anytime soon. Those were missiles that came out of that cornfield. Nuclear missiles. I don’t know if one of them blew up or what, but there’s only one reason those damned things would’ve gone off. The whole world may be shooting missiles at itself right now.”

  The woman laughed, the sound edging toward hysteria. “You ain’t got the sense God gave a pissant! Somebody had to see all that fire! They’ll send help! We gotta get to Blakeman!”

  “Right,” Josh said. He was tired of talking, and he was using up precious air. He crawled away a few feet and burrowed a place to fit his body into. Intense thirst taunted him, but he had to relieve himself, too. Later, he thought, too tired to move. The pain was getting bad again. His mind began to drift beyond PawPaw’s basement, beyond the burned cornfield toward what might remain out there, if, indeed, World War III had started. It might be over by now. The Russians might be invading, or the Americans pushing into Russia. He thought of Rose and the boys; were they dead or alive? He might never know. “Oh, God,” he whispered in the dark, and he curled his body up to stare at nothing.

  “Uh ... uh ... uh.” PawPaw was making a stuttering, choking noise. Then he said loudly, “Gopher’s in the hole! Amy! Where’re my bedroom slippers?”

  The little girl made another hurt, sobbing sound, and Josh clenched his teeth to hold back a scream of outrage. Such a pretty child, he thought. And now dying—like all of us are dying. We’re already in our graves. Already laid out and waiting.

  He had the sensation of being pinned to the mat by an opponent he’d not planned to meet. He could almost hear the referee’s hand slap the canvas: One ... two ...

  Josh’s shoulders shifted. Not yet three. Soon, but not yet.

  And he drifted into a tortured sleep with the sound of the child’s pain haunting his soul.

  14

  “DISCIPLINE AND CONTROL.” THE Shadow Soldier said, in a voice like the crack of a belt across a little boy’s legs. “That’s what makes a man. Remember ... remember ...”

  Colonel James Macklin cowered in the muddy pit. There was only a slit of light, twenty feet above him, between the ground and the edge of the corrugated metal lid that covered the pit. It was enough to let the flies in, and they buzzed in circles around his face, darting to the piles of filth that surrounded him. He didn’t remember how long he’d been down here; he figured the Charlies came once a day, and if that was true then he’d been in the pit for thirty-nine days. But maybe they came twice a day, so his calculations might be wrong. Maybe they skipped a day or two. Maybe they came three times in one day and skipped the next two days. Maybe ...

  “Discipline and control, Jimbo.” The Shadow Soldier was sitting cross-legged against one wall of the pit, about five feet away. The Shadow Soldier was wearing a camouflage uniform, and he had dark green and black camouflage warpaint across his sallow, floating face. “Shape up, soldier.”

  “Yes,” Macklin said. “Shape up.” He lifted a skinny hand and waved the flies away.

  And then the banging started, and Macklin whimpered and drew himself up tightly against the wall. The Charlies were overhead, hitting the metal with bamboo sticks and billy clubs. The sound echoed, doubled and tripled in the pit, until Macklin put his hands to his ears; the hammering kept on, louder and louder, and Macklin felt a scream about to rip itself from his throat.

  “No,” the Shadow Soldier warned, his eyes like craters on the face of the moon. “Don’t let them hear you scream.”

  Macklin scooped up a handful of muck and jammed it into his mouth. The Shadow Soldier was right. The Shadow Soldier was always right.

  The banging stopped, and the metal lid was pulled to one side. Hazy sunlight stabbed Macklin’s eyes; he could see them up there, leaning over the pit, grinning at him. “ ’Nel Macreen!” one of them called to him. “You hungry, ’Nel Macreen?”

  His mouth full of mud and filth, Macklin nodded and sat up like a dog begging for a scrap. “Careful,” the Shadow Soldier whispered. “Careful.”

  “You hungry, ‘Nel Macreen?”

  “Please,” Macklin said, muck running from his mouth. He lifted his emaciated arms toward the light.

  “Catch, ’Nel Macreen!” An object fell into the mud a few feet away, near the decaying corpse of an infantryman named Ragsdale. Macklin crawled over the body and picked the object up; it was a cake of oily, fried rice. He began to gnaw at it greedily, tears of joy springing to his eyes. The Charlies above him were laughing. Macklin crawled over the remains of an air force captain the other men had known as “Mississippi” because of his thick drawl; now Mississippi was a silent bundle of cloth and bones. In the far corner was a third corpse—another infantryman, an Oklahoma kid named McGee—slowly moldering in the mud. Macklin crouched by McGee and chewed on the rice, almost sobbing with pleasure.

  “Hey, ’Nel Macreen! You a dirty thing! Bath time!”

  Macklin whimpered and flinched, hunching his head down between his arms because he knew what was coming.

  One of the Charlies overturned a bucket of human waste into the pit, and the sludge streamed down on top of Macklin, running over his back, shoulders and head. The Charlies howled with laughter, but Macklin concentrated on the rice cake. Some of the mess had splattered onto it, and he paused to wipe it off on the tatters of his air force flight jacket.

  “There go!” the Charlie who’d dumped the bucket called down. “You creen boy now!”

  The flies were rioting around Macklin’s head. This was a good meal today, Macklin thought. This one would keep him alive a while longer, and as he chewed it the Shadow Soldier said, “That’s right, Jimbo. Eat every bit of it. Every last bit.”

  “You stay creen, now!” the Charlie said, and the metal lid was pulled back into place, sealing off the sunlight.

  “Discipline and control.” The Shadow Soldier had crept closer. “That’s what makes a man.”

  “Yes, sir,” Macklin answered, and the Shadow Soldier watched him with eyes that burned like napalm in the dark.

  “Colonel!”
>
  A faraway voice was calling him. It was hard to concentrate on that voice, because pain was spreading through his bones. Something heavy lay on top of him, almost snapping his spine. A sack of potatoes, he thought. No, no. Heavier than that.

  “Colonel Macklin!” the voice persisted.

  Go away, Macklin wished. Please go away. He tried to lift his right hand to wave the flies from his face, but when he did a bolt of white-hot agony was driven through his arm and shoulder, and he groaned as it continued into his backbone.

  “Colonel! It’s Ted Warner! Can you hear me?”

  Warner. Teddybear Warner. “Yes,” Macklin said. Pain lanced his rib cage. He knew he hadn’t spoken loudly enough, so he tried again. “Yes. I can hear you.”

  “Thank God! I’ve got a flashlight, Colonel!” A wash of light crept under Macklin’s eyelids, and he allowed it to pry them open.

  The flashlight’s beam probed down from about ten feet above Macklin’s head. The rock dust and smoke were still thick, but Macklin could tell he was lying at the bottom of a pit. By slowly turning his head, the pain about to make him pass out again, he saw that the opening was hardly large enough to let a man crawl through; how he’d been compressed into a space like this he didn’t know. Macklin’s legs were drawn up tightly beneath him, his back bent by the weight, not of a potato sack, but of a human body. A dead man, but who it was Macklin couldn’t tell.

  Jammed into the pit on top of him was a tangle of cables and broken pipes. He tried to push against the awful weight to at least get his legs some room, but the searing pain leaped at his right hand again. He swiveled his head back around the other way, and with the aid of the light from above he saw what he considered a major problem.

  His right hand had disappeared into a crack in the wall. The crack was maybe one inch in width, and rivulets of blood gleamed on the rock.

  My hand, he thought numbly. The images of Becker’s exploding fingers came to him. He realized his hand must’ve slipped into a fissure when he fell down there, and then when the rock had shifted again ...