Swan Song

by Robert R. McCammon

  At the western edge of the encampment, on rough and rock-stubbled ground, over a hundred corpses lay where they’d collapsed. The bodies had been stripped naked by scavengers, who lived in pits in the dirt and were contemptuously called “dirtwarts” by the people who lived closest to the lake shore. Strewn out almost to the western horizon was a junkyard of cars, RVs, campers, Jeeps and motorcycles that had run out of gas or whose engines had locked for want of oil. The scavengers scrambled out, tore the seats out of cars, took the tires off, ripped the doors and hoods and trunks away to make their own bizarre dwellings. Gas tanks were drained by parties of armed men from the main encampment, the gas set aside to fuel the torches—because light had become strength, an almost mystic protection against the horrors of the dark.

  Two figures, both laden with backpacks, trudged across the desert toward the light of the torches, about a half mile ahead. It was the night of August twenty-third, one month and six days after the bombs. The two figures walked through the junkyard of vehicles, not hesitating as they stepped on the occasional nude corpse. Over the odors of corruption they could smell the salt lake. Their own car, a BMW stolen from a lot in the ghost town of Carson City, Nevada, had run out of gas about twelve miles back, and they’d been walking all night, following the glow of the lights reflected off low-lying clouds.

  Something rattled off to the side, behind the scavenged wreck of a Dodge Charger. The figure in the lead stopped and drew a .45 automatic from a shoulder holster under a blue goosedown parka. The sound did not repeat itself, and after a silent moment the two figures began to walk toward the encampment again, their pace faster.

  The lead figure had taken about five more steps when a hand burst from the loose dirt and sand at his feet and grabbed his left ankle, jerking him off balance. His shout of alarm and the .45 went off together, but the gun fired toward the sky. He hit hard on his left side, the air whooshing from his lungs with the shock, and a human shape scrabbled like a crab from a pit that had opened in the earth. The crab-thing fell upon the man with the knapsack, planted a knee in his throat and began to batter his face with a left-hand fist.

  The second figure screamed—a woman’s scream—then turned and started running through the junkyard. She heard footsteps behind her, sensing something gaining on her, and as she turned her head to look back she tripped over one of the naked corpses and went down on her face. She tried to scramble up, but suddenly a sneakered foot pressed on the back of her head, forcing her nostrils and mouth into the dirt. Her body thrashing, she began to suffocate.

  A few yards away, the crab-thing shifted, using the left knee to pin the young man’s gun hand to the ground, the right knee pressed into his chest. The young man was gasping for air, his eyes wide and stunned over a dirty blond beard. And then the crab-thing drew with its left hand a hunting knife from a leather sheath under a long, dusty black overcoat; the hunting knife slashed fast and deep across the young man’s throat—once, again, a third time. The young man stopped struggling and his lips pulled back from his teeth in a grimace.

  The woman fought for life; she got her head turned, her cheek mashed into the ground, and she begged, “Please ... don’t kill me! I’ll give you ... give you what you want! Please don’t ...”

  The sneakered foot suddenly drew back. The point of what felt like an ice pick pricked her cheek just below her right eye.

  “No tricks.” It was a boy’s voice, high and reedy. “Understand?” The ice pick jabbed for emphasis.

  “Yes,” she answered. The boy grabbed a handful of her long, raven-black hair and pulled her up to a sitting position. She was able to make out his face in the dim wash of the distant lights. He was just a kid, maybe thirteen or fourteen years old, wearing an oversized, filthy brown sweater and gray trousers with holes where the knees had been; he was skinny to the point of emaciation, his high-cheekboned face pale and cadaverous. His dark hair was plastered to his skull with grime and sweat, and he wore a pair of goggles—the kind of goggles, trimmed in battered leather, that she figured World War II fighter pilots might have worn. The lens magnified his eyes as if through fishbowls. “Don’t hurt me, okay? I swear I won’t scream.”

  Roland Croninger laughed. That was about the stupidest fucking thing he’d ever heard. “You can scream if you want to. Nobody gives a shit whether you scream or not. Take the pack off.”

  “You got him?” Colonel Macklin called, from where he crouched atop the other body.

  “Yes, sir,” Roland answered. “It’s a woman.”

  “Bring her over here!”

  Roland picked up the pack and stepped backward. “Start moving.” She started to rise, but he shoved her down again. “No. Not on your feet. Crawl.”

  She started crawling through the dirt, over the festering bodies. A scream was locked behind her teeth, but she didn’t let it get loose. “Rudy?” she called weakly. “Rudy? You okay?”

  And then she saw the figure in the black coat ripping open Rudy’s backpack, and she saw all the blood, and she knew they’d stepped into deep shit.

  Roland tossed the other pack over to Colonel Macklin, then put his ice pick away in the elastic waistband of the trousers he’d stripped from the corpse of a boy about his age and size. He pried the automatic out of Rudy’s dead fingers as the woman sat nearby, numbly watching.

  “Good gun,” he told the King. “We can use it.”

  “Got to have more clips,” Macklin answered, digging through the pack with one hand. He pulled out socks, underwear, toothpaste, an army surplus mess kit—and a canteen that sloshed when he shook it. “Water!” he said. “Oh, Jesus—it’s fresh water!” He got the canteen between his thighs and unscrewed the cap, then took several swigs of sweet, delicious water; it ran down through the gray-swirled stubble of his new beard and dripped to the ground.

  “You got a canteen, too?” Roland asked her.

  She nodded, pulling the canteen strap from her shoulder under the ermine coat she’d taken from a Carson City boutique. She was wearing leopard-spotted designer jeans and expensive boots, and around her neck were ropes of pearls and diamond chains.

  “Give it here.”

  She looked into his face and drew her back up straight. He was just a punk, and she knew how to handle punks. “Fuck you,” she told him, and she uncapped it and started drinking, her hard blue eyes challenging him over the canteen’s rim.

  “Hey!” someone called from the darkness; the voice was hoarse, scabrous-sounding. “You catch a woman over there?”

  Roland didn’t answer. He watched the woman’s silken throat working as she drank.

  “I’ve got a bottle of whiskey!” the voice continued. “I’ll trade you!”

  She stopped drinking. The Perrier suddenly tasted foul.

  “A bottle of whiskey for thirty minutes!” the voice said. “I’ll give her back to you when I’m through! Deal?”

  “I’ve got a carton of cigarettes!” another man called, from off to the left beyond an overturned Jeep. “Fifteen minutes for a carton of cigarettes!”

  She hurriedly capped the canteen and threw it at the kid’s sneakered feet. “Here,” she said, keeping her eyes fixed on his. “You can have it all.”

  “Ammo clips!” Macklin exclaimed, pulling three of them out of Rudy’s pack. “We’ve got ourselves some firepower!”

  Roland opened the canteen, took a few swallows of water, recapped it and slid the strap over his shoulder. From all around them drifted the voices of other dirtwarts, offering caches of liquor, cigarettes, matches, candy bars and other valuables for time with the newly snared woman. Roland remained quiet, listening to the rising bids with the pleasure of an auctioneer who knows he has a prize of real worth. He studied the woman through the eyeglass-goggles he’d made for himself, gluing the appropriate-strength lenses—found in the wreckage of a Pocatello optometry shop— into army surplus tank commander goggles. She was unmarked except for several small, healing gashes on her cheeks and forehead—and that alone made her
a very special prize. Most of the women in the encampment had lost their hair and eyebrows and were marked with keloid scars of various colors, from dark brown to scarlet. This woman’s black hair cascaded around her shoulders; it was dirty, but there were no bald patches in it—the first signs of radiation poisoning. She had a strong, square-chinned face; a haughty face, Roland thought. The face of roughneck royalty. Her electric-blue eyes moved slowly from the gun to Rudy’s corpse and back to Roland’s face, as if she were figuring the precise points of a triangle. Roland thought she might be in her late twenties or early thirties, and his eyes slid down to the mounds of her breasts, swelling a red T-shirt with RICH BITCH stenciled across it in rhinestones underneath the ermine coat. He thought he detected her nipples sticking out, as if the danger and death had revved her sexual engine.

  He felt a pressure in his stomach, and he quickly lifted his gaze from her nipples. He had suddenly wondered what one of them might feel like between his teeth.

  Her full-lipped mouth parted. “Do you like what you see?”

  “A flashlight!” one of the dirtwarts offered. “I’ll give you a flashlight for her!”

  Roland didn’t respond. This woman made him think of the pictures in the magazines he’d found in the bottom drawer of his father’s dresser, back in his other, long-ago life. His belly was tightening, and there was a pounding in his nuts as if they were being squeezed by a brutal fist. “What’s your name?”

  “Sheila,” she answered. “Sheila Fontana. What’s yours?” She had determined, with the cold logic of a born survivor, that her chances were better here, with this punk kid and the man with one hand, than out in the dark with those other things. The one-handed man cursed and dumped the rest of Rudy’s pack on the ground.

  “Roland Croninger.”

  “Roland,” she repeated, making it sound like she was licking a lollipop. “You’re not going to give me to them, are you, Roland?”

  “Was he your husband?” Roland prodded Rudy’s body with his foot.

  “No. We traveled together, that’s all.” Actually, they had lived together for almost a year, and he’d done some pimping for her back in Oakland, but there was no need to confuse the kid. She looked at Rudy’s bloody throat and then quickly away; she felt a pang of regret, because he had been a good business manager, a fantastic lover, and he’d kept them supplied with plenty of blow. But he was just dead meat now, and that was how the world turned. As Rudy himself would’ve said, you cover your own ass, at all and any cost.

  Something moved on the ground behind Sheila, and she turned to look. A vaguely human shape was crawling toward her. It stopped about seven or eight feet away, and a hand covered with open, running sores lifted a paper bag. “Candy barsssss?” a mangled voice offered.

  Roland fired the automatic, and the noise of the shot made Sheila jump. The thing on the ground grunted and then made a sound like a yelping dog; it scrambled to its knees and scurried away amid the junked vehicles.

  Sheila knew the kid wasn’t going to turn her over to them, after all. Hoarse, garbled laughter came from other, hidden pits in the dirt. Sheila had seen plenty of Hell since she and Rudy had left a coke dealer’s cabin in the Sierras, where they’d been hiding from the San Francisco cops when the bombs had hit, but this was by far the worst. She looked down into the kid’s goggled eyes, because her height approached six feet; she was as big-boned as an Amazon warrior, but all curves and compliance when it met her needs, and she knew he was hooked through the cock.

  “What the hell is this shit?” Macklin said, leaning over the items he’d pulled out of Sheila’s backpack.

  Sheila knew what the one-handed man had found. She approached him, disregarding the kid’s .45, and saw what he was holding: a plastic bag full of snow-white, extra-fine Colombian sugar. Scattered around him were three more plastic bags of high-grade cocaine, and about a dozen plastic bottles of poppers, Black Beauties, Yellowjackets, Bombers, Red Ladies, PCP and LSD tabs. “That’s my medicine bag, friend,” she told him. “If you’re looking for food, I’ve got a couple of old Whoppers and some fries in there, too. You’re welcome to it, but I want my stash back.”

  “Drugs,” Macklin realized. “What is this? Cocaine?” He dropped the bag and picked up one of the bottles, lifting his filthy, blood-splattered face toward her. His crewcut was growing out, the dark brown hair peppered with gray. His eyes were deep holes carved in a rocklike face. “Pills, too? What are you, an addict?”

  “I’m a gourmet” she replied calmly. She figured the kid wasn’t going to let this crazy one-handed fucker hurt her, but her muscles were tensed for fight or flight. “What are you?”

  “His name is Colonel James Macklin,” Roland told her. “He’s a war hero.”

  “Looks to me like the war’s over. And we lost ... hero,” she said, staring directly into Macklin’s eyes. “Take what you want, but I need my stash back.”

  Macklin sized the young woman up, and he decided he might not be able to throw her to the ground and rape her, as he had intended until this instant. She might be too much to take with one hand, unless he wrestled her down and got the knife to her throat. He didn’t want to try and fail in front of Roland, though his penis had begun to pound. He grunted and dug for the hamburgers. When he found them, he flung the pack to Sheila, and she started gathering up the packets of coke and the pill bottles.

  Macklin crawled over and pulled the shoes off Rudy’s feet; he worked a gold Rolex wristwatch from the corpse’s left wrist and put it on his own.

  “How come you’re out here?” Sheila asked Roland, who was watching her pack the cocaine and pills away. “How come you’re not over there, closer to the light?”

  “They don’t want dirtwarts,” Macklin replied. “That’s what they call us. Dirtwarts.” He nodded toward the rectangular hole a few feet away; it had been covered with a tarpaulin, impossible to detect in the darkness, and looked to Sheila to be about five feet deep. The corners of the tarp were held down with stones. “They don’t think we smell good enough to be any closer.” Macklin’s grin held madness. “How do you think I smell, lady?”

  She thought he smelled like a hog in heat, but she shrugged and motioned toward a can of Right Guard deodorant that had fallen out of Rudy’s pack.

  Macklin laughed. He was unbuckling Rudy’s belt in preparation to pull the trousers off. “See, we live out here on what we can get and what we can take. We wait for new ones to pass through on their way to the light.” He motioned with a nod of his head toward the lake shore. “Those people have the power: guns, plenty of canned food and bottled water, gas for their torches. Some of them even have tents. They roll around in that salt water, and we listen to them scream. They won’t let us near it. Oh, no! They think we’d pollute it or something.” He got Rudy’s trousers off and flung them into the pit. “See, the hell of all this is that the boy and I should be living in the light right now. We should be wearing clean clothes, and taking warm showers, and having all the food and water we want. Because we were prepared ... we were ready! We knew the bombs were going to fall. Everybody in Earth House knew it!”

  “Earth House? What’s that?”

  “It’s where we came from,” Macklin said, crouching on the ground. “Up in the Idaho mountains. We walked a long way, and we saw a lot of death, and Roland figured that if we could get to the Great Salt Lake we could wash ourselves in it, clean all the radiation off, and the salt would heal us. That’s right, you know. Salt heals. Especially this.” He held up his bandaged stump; the blood-caked bandages were hanging down, and some of them had turned green. Sheila caught the reek of infected flesh. “I need to bathe it in that salt water, but they won’t let us any closer. They say that we live off the dead. So they shoot at us when we try to cross open ground. But now—now—we’ve got our own firepower!” He nodded toward the automatic Roland held.

  “It’s a big lake,” Sheila said. “You don’t have to go through that encampment to get there. You could go around it.” />
  “No. Two reasons: somebody would move into our pit while we were gone and take everything we have; and second, nobody keeps Jimbo Macklin from what he wants.” He grinned at her, and she thought his face resembled a skull. “They don’t know who I am, or what I am. But I’m going to show them—oh, yes! I’m going to show all of them!” He turned his head toward the encampment, sat staring at the distant torches for a moment, then looked back at her. “You wouldn’t want to fuck, would you?”

  She laughed. He was about the dirtiest, most repulsive thing she’d ever seen. But even as she laughed, she knew it was a mistake; she stopped her laugh in mid-note.

  “Roland,” Macklin said quietly, “bring me the gun.”

  Roland hesitated; he knew what was about to happen. Still, the King had delivered a command, and he was a King’s Knight and could not disobey. He took a step forward, hesitated again.

  “Roland,” the King said.

  This time Roland walked to him and delivered the pistol to his outstretched left hand. Macklin awkwardly gripped it and pointed it at Sheila’s head. Sheila lifted her chin defiantly, hooked the pack’s strap over her shoulder and stood up. “I’m going to start walking toward the camp,” she said. “Maybe you can shoot a woman in the back, war hero. I don’t think you can. So long, guys; it’s been fun.” She made herself step over Rudy’s corpse, then started walking purposefully through the junkyard, her heart pounding and her teeth gritted as she waited for the bullet.

  Something moved off to her left. A figure in rags ducked down behind the wreckage of a Chevy station wagon. Something else scrambled across the dirt about twenty feet in front of her, and she realized she’d never make the camp alive.