Swan Song

by Robert R. McCammon

  Inside, cushioned with newspapers and rags, were three bottles of Johnnie Walker Red Label Scotch, a .357 Magnum revolver and a box or two of ammunition, some moldy-looking manuscripts bound with rubber bands, and another object wrapped in heavy plastic. He began to unfold the plastic. “It’s funny as shit, it really is,” he said. “I came out here to nowhere to get away from people. Can’t stand the breed. Never could. I’m sure as hell no Good Samaritan. And then all of a sudden the highway’s covered with cars and corpses, and people are running like hell and I’m up to my ears in the human race. I say screw it! We deserved everything we got!” He unfolded the last layer of plastic to reveal a radio with an intricate set of dials and knobs. He lifted it from the footlocker, opened the desk drawer and got out eight batteries. “Shortwave,” he told them as he began to put the batteries in the back of the radio. “I used to like to listen to concerts from Switzerland in the middle of the night.” He closed the footlocker and snapped the padlock on again.

  “I don’t understand,” Sister said.

  “You will. Just don’t get too bent out of shape, no matter what happens out there in the next few minutes. Like I say, it’s all a game, but they’re pretty jumpy today. I just wanted to prepare you.” He motioned for them to follow, and they returned to the front room.

  “It’s my turn today!” the old man cried out, sitting up on his knees, his eyes shining.

  “You did it yesterday,” Paul told him calmly. “It’s Kevin’s turn today.” He offered the radio to the young man. Kevin hesitated, then took it as if accepting a child in swaddling clothes.

  The others gathered around him, except for Mona Ramsey, who crawled petulantly away. But even she watched her husband excitedly. Kevin grasped the tip of the radio’s recessed antenna and drew it all the way out; it jutted up about two feet, the metal shining like a promise.

  “Okay,” Paul said. “Switch it on.”

  “Not yet,” the young man balked. “Please. Not just yet.”

  “Go ahead, man!” Steve Buchanan’s voice shook. “Do it!”

  Kevin slowly turned one of the knobs, and the red needle moved all the way to one end of the frequency dial. Then he laid his finger against a red button and let it rest there as if he couldn’t bear to press it. He drew a sudden, sharp breath—and his finger punched the ON button.

  Sister winced, and everyone else breathed or flinched or shifted, too.

  No sound came from the radio.

  “Crank the volume up, man!”

  “It’s already set high,” Kevin told him, and slowly—delicately— he began to move the needle along the frequency dial.

  A quarter inch more, and still dead air. The red needle continued to move, almost imperceptibly. Sister’s palms were sweating. Slowly, slowly: another fraction of an inch further.

  A high burst of static suddenly wailed from the speaker, and Sister and everyone else in the room jumped. Kevin looked up at Paul, who said, “Atmosphere’s supercharged.” The red needle moved on, through the thickets of little numbers and decimal points, searching for a human voice.

  Different tones of static faded in and out, weird cacophonies of atmospheric violence. Sister heard the howl of the wolves outside mingling with the static noise—a lonely sound, almost heartbreaking in its loneliness. Spaces of dead air alternated with the grating, terrible static—and Sister knew she was hearing ghosts from the black craters where cities had been.

  “You’re going too fast!” Mona objected and he slowed the needle’s progress to a speed that might tempt a spider to spin a web between his fingers. Sister’s heart pounded at every infinitesimal change in the pitch or volume of static pouring from the speaker.

  Finally, Kevin came to the end of the dial. His eyes were luminous with tears.

  “Try AM,” Paul told him.

  “Yeah! Try AM!” Steve said, pressing over Kevin’s shoulder. “There’s gotta be somethin’ on AM!”

  Kevin turned another small dial to change from shortwave to AM, and he began to lead the red searching needle back over the numbers again. This time, except for abrupt pops and clicks and a faint, distant humming noise like honeybees at work, the band was almost completely dead. Sister didn’t know how long it took Kevin to reach the other end of the dial; it could have been ten minutes, or fifteen, or twenty. But he stretched it out to the very last faint sizzle—and then he sat holding the radio between his hands, staring at it as a pulse beat steadily at his temple.

  “Nothing,” he whispered, and he pressed the red button.

  Silence.

  The old man put his hands to his face.

  Sister heard Artie, who was standing beside her, give a helpless, despairing sigh. “Not even Detroit,” he said listlessly. “Dear God ... not even Detroit.”

  “You turned it way too fast, man!” Steve told Kevin Ramsey. “Shit, you spun through it! I thought I heard something—it sounded like a voice!—and you went right through it!”

  “No!” Mona shouted. “There was no voice! We did it too early, and that’s why there was no voice! If we’d done it on time, by the rules, we would’ve heard somebody this time! I know it!”

  “It was my turn.” The old man’s pleading eyes turned toward Sister. “Everybody always steals my turn.”

  Mona began to sob. “We didn’t go by the rules! We missed the voice because we didn’t go by the rules!”

  “Fuck it!” Steve snapped. “I heard a voice! I swear to God I did! It was right ...” He started to take the radio, but Paul Thorson snatched it out of Kevin’s hands before he could. Paul lowered the antenna and turned away, going back through the curtain into the other room. Sister couldn’t believe what she’d just witnessed; anger stirred within her, and pity for the poor, hopeless souls. She strode purposefully into the room where Paul Thorson was wrapping the radio back up in its protective plastic.

  He looked up at her, and she lifted her right hand and gave him a slap across the face with all the fury of judgment behind it. The blow knocked him sprawling and left a red handprint on his cheek. Still, as he fell, he grasped the radio protectively to his chest and took the fall on his shoulder. He lay blinking up at her.

  “I’ve never seen anything so cruel in all my life!” Sister raged. “Do you think that’s funny? Do you get pleasure out of that? Get up, you sonofabitch! I’ll knock your ass right through that wall!” She advanced on him, but he held up a hand to ward her off, and she hesitated.

  “Wait,” he croaked. “Hold on. You don’t get it yet, do you?”

  “You’re gonna get it, shitass!”

  “Back off. Just wait, and watch. Then you can kick butt if you still want to.” He pulled himself up, continued wrapping the radio and replaced it in the footlocker; then he snapped the padlock shut and pushed the footlocker underneath the bed again. “After you,” he said, motioning her into the front room.

  Mona Ramsey was bent over in the corner, sobbing as her husband tried to comfort her. The old man had curled up against one wall, staring into space, and Steve was kicking and hammering at the wall with his fist, shouting obscenities. In the center of the room, Artie stood very still as the red-haired teenager rampaged around him.

  “Mona?” Paul said, with Sister standing just behind him and to the side.

  The young woman raised her eyes to his. The old man looked at him, and so did Kevin, and Steve stopped hammering at the walls.

  “You’re right, Mona,” Paul went on. “We didn’t go by the rules. That’s why we didn’t hear a voice. Now, I’m not saying we will hear one if we go by the rules tomorrow. But tomorrow is another day, right? That’s what Scarlett O’Hara said. Tomorrow we’ll turn the radio on and try again. And if we don’t hear anything tomorrow, we’ll try the day after that. You know, it would take some time to repair a radio station and kick the juice back on. It would take quite a while. But tomorrow we’ll try again. Right?”

  “Sure!” Steve said. “Hell, it would take a while to get the juice back on!” He grinned,
looking at all of them in turn. “I bet they’re trying to get the stations back on the air right now! God, that’d be a job, wouldn’t it?”

  “I used to listen to the radio all the time!” the old man spoke up. He was smiling, too, as if he’d stepped into a dream. “I used to listen to the Mets on the radio in the summertime! Tomorrow we’ll hear somebody, I’ll bet you!”

  Mona clutched at her husband’s shoulder. “We didn’t go by the rules, did we? See? I told you—it’s important to have rules!” But her crying was over, and just as suddenly she started to laugh. “God’ll let us hear somebody if we follow the rules! Tomorrow! Yes, I think it might be tomorrow!”

  “Right!” Kevin agreed, hugging her close. “Tomorrow!”

  “Yeah.” Paul looked around the room; he was keeping a smile on his face, but his eyes were pain-ridden and haunted. “I kind of think it might be tomorrow, too.” His gaze met Sister’s. “Don’t you?”

  She hesitated, and then she understood. These people had nothing to live for but that radio in the footlocker. Without it, without being able to look forward to a very special time once a day, they might very well kill themselves. Keeping it on all the time would waste batteries and blunt the hope, and she saw that Paul Thorson knew they might never hear a human voice on that radio again. But, in his own way, he was being a Good Samaritan. He was keeping these people alive in more ways than by just feeding them.

  “Yes,” she finally said. “I think it might be.”

  “Good.” His smile deepened, and so did the networks of lines around his eyes. “I hope you two are poker players. I’ve got a hot deck of cards and plenty of matches. You weren’t going anywhere in a hurry, were you?”

  Sister glanced at Artie. He was standing stoop-shouldered, his eyes vacant, and she knew he was thinking of the hole where Detroit had been. She watched him for a moment, and finally he straightened up and answered in a weak but courageous voice, “No. I’m not hurrying anywhere. Not anymore.”

  “We play five-card draw around here. If I win, I get to read my poetry to you, and you have to smile and enjoy it. Either that or you can dump the crap buckets—your choice.”

  “I’ll make up my mind when I come to it,” Sister replied, and she decided that she liked Paul Thorson very much.

  “You sound like a real gambler, lady!” He clapped his hands together with mock glee. “Welcome to the club!”

  33

  SWAN HAD AVOIDED IT as long as she possibly could. But now, as she stepped out of the bathtub’s wonderfully warm water— leaving it murky brown with shed skin and grime—and reached for the large towel that Leona Skelton had set out for her, she had to do it. She had to.

  She looked in the mirror.

  The light came from a single lamp, its wick turned low, but it was enough. Swan stared into the oval glass over the basin, and she thought she might be seeing someone in a grotesque, hairless Halloween mask. One hand fluttered up to her lips; the awful image did the same.

  Shreds of skin were hanging from her race, peeling off like tree bark. Brown, crusty streaks lay across her forehead and the bridge of her nose, and her eyebrows—once so blond and thick—had been burned clean away. Her lips were cracked like dry earth, and her eyes seemed to be sunken down into dark holes in her skull. On her right cheek were two small black warts, and on her lips were three more of them. She’d seen those same wartlike things on Josh’s forehead, had seen the brown burns on his face and the mottled gray-white of his skin, but she’d gotten used to what Josh looked like. Seeing herself with a stubble where her hair had been and the dead white skin dangling from her face jarred loose tears of shock and horror.

  She was startled by a polite knock at the bathroom door. “Swan? You all right, child?” Leona Skelton asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” she answered, but her voice was unsteady, and she knew the woman had heard.

  After a pause, Leona said, “Well, I’ve got some grub for you when you’re ready.”

  Swan thanked her and said she’d be out in a few minutes, and Leona went away. The Halloween-mask monster peered at her from the mirror.

  She had left her grimy clothes with Leona, who’d said she’d try to wash them in a pot and dry them before the fire, and so she wrapped herself up in the floppy plaid boy’s-size robe and thick white socks that Leona had left for her. The robe was part of a trunkful of clothes that had belonged to Leona’s son, Joe—who now, the woman had said proudly, lived in Kansas City with a family of his own and was the manager of a supermarket. Been meanin’ to throw that trunk out, Leona had told Swan and Josh, but somehow I just never got around to the job.

  Swan’s body was clean. The soap she’d used had smelled like lilacs, and she thought wistfully of her gardens bright with color beneath the sun. She hobbled out of the bathroom, leaving the lantern burning for Josh to see by when he took his bath. The house was chilly, and she went directly to the fireplace to warm herself again. Josh was asleep on the floor under a red blanket with his head on a pillow. Near his head was a TV tray with an empty bowl and cup on it and a couple of corn muffin crumbs. The blanket had pulled off his shoulder, and Swan bent down and tucked it up underneath his chin.

  “He told me how you two got together,” Leona said, quietly so as not to disturb Josh; he was sleeping so soundly, though, that she doubted he’d wake if a truck came through the wall. She continued into the room from the kitchen, bringing Swan a TV tray with a bowl of lukewarm vegetable soup, a cup of well water and three corn muffins. Swan took the tray and sat down in front of the fireplace. The house was quiet. Davy Skelton was asleep, and except for the occasional rush of wind around the roof there was no sound but the crackling of embers and the ticking of a windup clock on the mantel that said it was forty minutes after eight.

  Leona eased herself into a chair covered with a garish flower-patterned fabric. Her knees popped. She winced and rubbed them with a gnarled, age-spotted hand. “Old bones like to talk,” she said. She nodded toward the sleeping giant. “He says you’re a mighty brave little girl. Says once you set your mind, you don’t give up. That true?”

  Swan didn’t know what to say. She shrugged, chewing on a rock-hard corn muffin.

  “Well, that’s what he told me. And it’s good to have a tough mind. Especially in times like these.” Her gaze moved past Swan and to the window. “Everything’s changed now. All that was is gone. I know it.” Her eyes narrowed. “I can hear a dark voice in that wind,” she said. “It’s sayin’, ‘All mine ... all mine.’ I don’t figure a whole lot of people are gonna be left out there, I’m sorry to say. Maybe the whole world’s just like Sullivan: blowin’ away, changin’, turnin’ into somethin’ different than what it was before.”

  “Like what?” Swan asked.

  “Who knows?” Leona shrugged. “Oh, the world’s not gonna end. That’s what I thought first off. But the world has got a tough mind, too.” She lifted a crooked finger for emphasis. “Even if all the people in all the big cities and little towns die, and all the trees and the crops turn black, and the clouds never let the sun through again, the world’ll keep turnin’. Oh, God gave this world a mighty spin, He did! And He put mighty tough minds and souls in a lot of people, too—people like you, maybe. And like your friend over there.”

  Swan thought she heard a dog barking. It was an uncertain sound, there for a few seconds and then masked by the wind. She stood up, looked out one window and then another, but couldn’t see much of anything. “Did you hear a dog bark?”

  “Huh? No, but you probably did, all right. Strays pass through town all the time, lookin’ for food. Sometimes I leave a few crumbs and a bowl of water on the porch steps.” She busied herself getting the new wood situated in the fireplace so it would catch amid the embers.

  Swan took another swallow from her cup of water and decided her teeth couldn’t take the battle with the corn muffins. She picked up a muffin and said, “Would it be okay if I took this water and the muffin out there?”

  “Sure
, go ahead. Guess strays need to eat, too. Watch out the wind don’t grab you ’way, though.”

  Swan took the muffin and cup of water out to the porch steps. The wind was stronger than it had been during daylight, carrying waves of dust before it. Her robe flapping around her, Swan put the food and water on one of the lower steps and looked in all directions, shielding her eyes from the dust. There was no sign of a dog. She went back up to where the screen door had been and stood there for a moment, and she was about to go back inside when she thought she detected a furtive movement off to the right. She waited, beginning to shiver.

  At last a small gray shape came nearer. The little terrier stopped about ten feet from the porch and sniffed the ground with his furry snout. He smelled the air next, trying to find Swan’s scent. The wind ruffled through his short, dusty coat, and then the terrier looked up at Swan and trembled.

  She felt a deep pang of pity for the creature. There was no telling where the dog had come from; it was frightened and wouldn’t approach the food, though Swan was standing up at the top of the steps. The terrier abruptly turned and bolted into the darkness. Swan understood; it didn’t trust human beings anymore. She left the food and water and went back into the house.

  The fire was burning cheerfully. Leona stood before it, warming her hands. Under his blanket, Josh kicked and snored more loudly, then quieted down again. “Did you see the dog?” Leona asked.

  “Yes, ma’am. It wouldn’t take the food while I was standing there, though.”

  “’Spect not. Probably got his pride, don’t you think?” She turned toward Swan, a round figure outlined in orange light, and Swan had to ask a question that had occurred to her while she was basking in the tub: “I don’t mean this to sound bad, but ... are you a witch?”

  Leona laughed huskily. “Ha! You say what you think, don’t you, child? Well, that’s fine! That’s too rare of a thing in this day and age!”