Swan Song

by Robert R. McCammon

  A machine gun chattered off to the right. Bullets zigzagged across the wall, cracking through the ice and thunking into the logs and dirt. Paul ducked his head, heard shouting from the eastern section, then the noise of more gunfire, and he knew the first attack had begun. He dared to lift his head, saw about forty more soldiers taking cover at the edge of the woods. They opened fire, but their bullets couldn’t penetrate the wall. Paul kept his head down and held his fire, waiting for a chance to tag one of them when they started across the open ground.

  On the eastern side of Mary’s Rest, the sentries saw a wave of perhaps two hundred soldiers coming out of the forest. The AOE infantry shouted and surged forward—and then they began tumbling into the network of hidden trenches, many of them breaking their ankles and legs as they hit bottom. The sentries, all armed with rifles, picked off their targets at random. Two of the sentries were shot and fell, but as soon as they hit the ground others were climbing up the ladders to take their places.

  The AOE soldiers, their formation in disarray and men falling everywhere, began to turn back for the cover of the woods and toppled into more ditches and pits. The wounded were crushed under the boots of their companions.

  At the same time, more than five hundred soldiers burst from the forest on the western edge of Mary’s Rest, along with dozens of armored cars, trucks and two bulldozers. As they rushed forward in a shouting mass the trenches opened under their feet. One of the bulldozers plunged down and overturned, and an armored car following right behind hit the bulldozer and exploded in a red fireball. Several of the other vehicles were snagged on tree stumps and unable to go either forward or backward. Scores of men tumbled into the ditches, breaking their bones. The lookouts fired as fast as they could select targets, and AOE soldiers fell dead in the snow.

  But most of the soldiers and vehicles kept coming, storming the western section of the wall, and behind them was a second wave of another two hundred troops. Machine gun, rifle and pistol fire began to chip at the wall, but still the bullets were turned aside.

  “Step up and open fire!” Bud Royce shouted.

  And a line of men and women stepped up on the two-foot-high bank of dirt that had been built along the wall’s base, aimed their guns and started shooting.

  Anna McClay ran along the wall, shouting, “Step up and give ’em hell!”

  A blaze of gunfire erupted along the western wall, and the first wave of AOE soldiers faltered. The second wave crashed into them, and then the vehicles were running men down as they scattered. Officers in armored cars and Jeeps shouted commands, but the troops were panicked. They fled toward the forest, and as Captain Carr stood up in his Jeep to order them back, a bullet pierced his throat and slammed him to the ground.

  The attack was over in another few minutes as the soldiers drew back deeper in the woods. Around the walls, the wounded crawled on the ground and the dead lay where they’d fallen. A victorious shout rang up from the defenders along the western wall, but a figure on horseback called out, “No! Stop it! Stop it!”

  Tears were streaming down Swan’s cheeks, and the gunfire still echoed in her head. “Stop it!” she shouted as Mule reared with her and pawed the air. She wheeled the horse toward Sister, who stood nearby with her sawed-off shotgun. “Make them stop!” Swan said. “They just killed other people! They shouldn’t be glad about that!”

  “They’re not glad about killing other people,” Sister told her. “They’re just glad they weren’t killed.” She motioned toward a man’s corpse that lay ten feet away, shot through the face. Someone else was already taking the dead man’s pistol and bullets. “There’re going to be more of those. If you can’t take what you see, you’d better get inside.”

  Swan looked around. A woman was sprawled on the ground, moaning as another woman and man bound up her bullet-shattered wrist with strips torn from a shirt. A few feet away, a dark-haired man lay contorted and dying, coughing up blood as other people tried to comfort him. Swan flinched with horror, her eyes returning to Sister.

  Sister was calmly reloading her shotgun. “You’d better go,” she suggested.

  Swan was torn; she knew she should be out there with the people who were fighting to protect her, but she couldn’t stand watching the death. The noise of gunfire was a thousand times worse than all the hurting sounds she’d ever experienced.

  But before she could decide to go or stay, there was the throaty growl of an engine beyond the wall. Someone shouted, “Jesus Christ! Look at that!”

  Sister hurried to the wall, and stepped up on the mound of dirt.

  Just emerging from the forest, about twenty yards to Sister’s left, was a tank. Its wide treads crunched over the wounded and dead alike. The snout of its gun was aimed directly at the wall. And dangling all over the tank, like grotesque hood ornaments, were human bones tied to wires—legs, arms, rib cages, hip bones, vertebrae and skulls, some still bearing scalps. The tank stopped right at the edge of the woods, its engine idling like a beast’s snarl.

  The tank’s hatch popped open. A hand emerged waving a white handkerchief.

  “Hold your fire!” Sister told the others. “Let’s see what they want first!”

  A helmeted head came up; the face was bandaged, the eyes covered with goggles. “Who’s in charge over there?” Roland Croninger called toward the row of faces he could see, like disembodied heads perched atop that damned wall.

  Some of the others looked at Sister; she didn’t want the responsibility, but she guessed she was it. “I am! What do you want?”

  “Peace,” Roland replied. He glanced at the bodies on the ground. “You people did a pretty good job!” He grinned, though inwardly he was shrieking with rage. Friend had said nothing about trenches and a defensive wall! How the hell had these goddamned farmers put together such a barricade? “Nice wall you’ve got there!” he said. “Looks pretty sturdy! Is it?”

  “It’ll do!”

  “Will it? I wonder how many rounds it would take to knock a hole through it and blow you to Hell, lady.”

  “I don’t know!” Sister had a rigid smile on her face, but sweat was running down her sides, and she knew they had no chance at all against that monstrous machine. “How much time do you have?”

  “A lot! All the time in the world!” He patted the cannon’s snout. It was too bad, he thought, that there were no shells for the cannon—and even if there were, none of them would know how to load and fire it. The second tank had broken down only a few hours out of Lincoln, and this one had to be driven by a corporal who’d once made his living hauling freight through the Rocky Mountains in a tractor-trailer rig; but even he couldn’t keep control of the big bastard all the time. Still, Roland liked riding in it, because the inside smelled like hot metal and sweat, and he could think of no better warhorse for a King’s Knight. “Hey, lady!” he called. “Why don’t you people give us what we want, and nobody else will get hurt! Okay?”

  “It looks to me like you’re the ones getting hurt!”

  “Oh, this little scrape? Lady, we haven’t started yet! This was just an exercise! See, now we know where your trenches are! Behind me are a thousand soldiers who’d really like to meet all you fine people! Or I might be wrong: They could be over on the other side, or circling down to the south! They could be anywhere!”

  Sister felt sick. There was no way to fight against a tank! She was aware of Swan standing beside her, peering over the wall. “Why don’t you just go on about your business and leave us alone?” Sister asked.

  “Our business won’t be done until we’ve gotten what we came for!” Roland said. “We want food, water and the girl! We want your guns and ammunition, and we want them now! Do I make myself clear?”

  “Perfectly,” she answered—and then she lifted her shotgun and squeezed the trigger.

  The distance was too great for an accurate shot, but pellets rang off Roland’s helmet as he ducked his head through the hatch. The white handkerchief was riddled with buckshot, and a half-dozen pe
llets had punctured his hand. Cursing and shaking with rage, Roland fell down into the bowels of the tank.

  The back of Sister’s neck crawled. She tensed, waiting for the first blast of the cannon—but it didn’t come. The tank’s engine revved, and the vehicle backed over the bodies and tree stumps toward the woods again. Sister’s nerves didn’t stop jangling until the tank had moved out of sight in the underbrush, and only then did she realize that something must be wrong with the tank; otherwise, why hadn’t they just blown a hole right through the wall?

  A red flare shot up into the sky from the western woods and exploded over the cornfield.

  “Here they come again!” Sister shouted grimly. She glanced at Swan. “You’d better get out of here before it starts.”

  Swan looked along the wall at the others who stood ready to fight, and she knew where she should be. “I’ll stay.”

  Another flare rose from the eastern woods and burst like a smear of blood against the sky.

  Gunfire swept the western wall, and Sister grabbed Swan to pull her behind cover. Bullets slammed against the logs, chips of ice and splinters spinning through the air. About twenty seconds after the first barrage had begun, the AOE soldiers massed in the forest on the eastern side of Mary’s Rest started firing, their bullets doing no major damage but keeping the defenders’ heads down. The shooting continued, and soon bullets were blasting chinks in the walls, some of them ricocheting off the ground, but others hitting flesh.

  And on the southern perimeter, the defenders saw more armored cars and trucks emerge from the forest, along with fifty or sixty soldiers. The Army of Excellence rushed the wall. Hidden trenches stopped several vehicles and toppled twenty or more men, but the rest of them kept coming. Two trucks got through the maze of ditches and tree stumps and crashed into the logs. The entire southern section of the wall trembled, but it held. Then the soldiers had covered the open ground and reached the wall, trying to climb over it; their fingers couldn’t grip the ice, and as they slipped back the defenders fired on them point-blank. Those without guns swung axes, picks and sharpened shovels.

  Mr. Polowsky climbed up on a dead sentry’s ladder, firing his pistol as fast as he could aim. “Drive them back!” he shouted. He took aim at an enemy soldier, but before he could pull the trigger a rifle bullet plowed into his chest and a second caught him in the side of the head. He fell off the ladder, and at once a woman plucked the pistol from his hand.

  “Fall back! Fall back!” Lieutenant Thatcher commanded as bullets whined around his head and soldiers were wounded and killed on every side. Thatcher didn’t wait for the others to obey; he turned and ran, and with his third stride a .38 slug hit him in the small of his back and propelled him into a ditch on top of four other men.

  The charge had been broken, and the soldiers retreated. They left their dead behind.

  “Hold your fire!” Sister shouted. The shooting died away, and in another minute it ceased over on the eastern wall as well.

  “I’m out of bullets!” a woman with a rifle said to Sister, and further down the line there were more calls for ammunition—but Sister knew that once the bullets everyone had for his own weapons were gone, there would be no more. They’re baiting us, she thought. Getting us to waste ammunition, and when the guns were useless they would storm the walls in a tide of death and destruction. Sister had six more shells for her own shotgun, and that was all.

  They’re going to break through, she realized. Sooner or later, they’re going to break through.

  She looked at Swan and saw in the girl’s dark eyes that Swan had reached the same conclusion.

  “They want me,” Swan said. The wind blew her hair around her pale, lovely face like the fanning of brilliant flames. “No one else. Just me.” Her gaze found one of the ladders that leaned against the wall.

  Sister’s arm shot out; her hand caught Swan’s chin and pulled her head back around. “You get that out of your mind!” Sister snapped. “Yes, they want you! He wants you! But don’t you think for one minute that it would be over if you went out to them!”

  “But ... if I went out there, maybe I could—”

  “You could not!” Sister interrupted. “If you went over that wall, all you’d be doing is telling the rest of us that there’s nothing worth fighting for!”

  “I don’t ...” She shook her head, sickened by the sights, sounds and smells of war. “I don’t want anyone else to die.”

  “It’s not up to you anymore. People are going to die. I may be dead before the day’s over. But some things are worth fighting and dying for. You’d better learn that right here and now, if you’re ever going to lead people.”

  “Lead people? What do you mean?”

  “You really don’t know, do you?” Sister released Swan’s chin. “You’re a natural-born leader! It’s in your eyes, your voice, the way you carry yourself—everything about you. People listen to you, and they believe what you say, and they want to follow you. If you said everyone should put down their guns right this minute, they’d do it. Because they know you’re somebody very special, Swan—whether you want to believe that or not. You’re a leader, and you’d better learn how to act like one.”

  “Me? A leader? No, I’m just ... I’m just a girl.”

  “You were born to lead people, and to teach them, too!” Sister affirmed. “This says you were.” She touched the outline of the glass ring in the leather satchel. “Josh knows it. So does Robin. And he knows you were, just like I do.” She motioned out beyond the wall, where she was certain the man with the scarlet eye must be. “Now it’s time you accepted it, too.”

  Swan was puzzled and disoriented. Her childhood in Kansas, before the seventeenth of July, seemed like the life of another person a hundred years ago. “Teach them what?” she asked.

  “What the future can be,” Sister answered.

  Swan thought of what she’d seen in the circle of glass: the green forests and meadows, the golden fields, the fragrant orchards of a new world.

  “Now get on that horse,” Sister said, “and ride around the walls. Sit up tall and proud, and let everybody see you. Sit like a princess,” she said, drawing her own self up straight, “and let everybody know there’s still something worth dying for in this damned world.”

  Swan looked at the ladder again. Sister was right. They wanted her, yes, but they wouldn’t stop if they had her; they’d just keep killing, like rabid dogs in a frenzy, because that was all they understood.

  She walked to Mule’s side, grasped the rope reins and swung up onto his back. He pranced around a little bit, still unnerved by the uproar, and then he settled down and responded to Swan’s touch. She urged him forward with a whisper, and Mule began to canter along the wall.

  Sister watched Swan ride away, her hair streaming behind her like a fiery banner, and she saw the others turn to look at her as well, saw them all stand a little straighter, saw them check their guns and ammunition after she’d passed by. Saw new resolve in their faces, and knew that they would all die for Swan—and their town—if it came to that. She hoped it would not, but she was certain the soldiers would return stronger than ever—and right now, at least, there was no way out.

  Sister reloaded her shotgun and stepped back up on the dirt bank to await the next attack.

  83

  WITH DARKNESS CAME THE bone-numbing cold. The bonfires chewed up wood that had been the walls and roofs of shacks, and the defenders of Mary’s Rest warmed themselves, ate and rested in hour-long shifts before they returned to the wall.

  Sister had four shells left. The soldier she’d killed lay about ten feet from the wall, the blood icy and black around what had been his chest. On the northern perimeter, Paul was down to twelve bullets, and during one brief skirmish just before dark the two men who’d been fighting on either side of him had been killed. A ricocheting slug had driven wood splinters into Paul’s forehead and right cheek, but otherwise he was okay.

  On the eastern side of Mary’s Rest, Robin cou
nted six shells left for his rifle. Guarding that section of the wall, along with Robin and about forty other people, was Anna McClay, who’d long ago run out of bullets for her own rifle and now carried a little .22 pistol she’d taken from a dead man.

  The attacks had continued all day, with lulls of an hour or two in between. First one side of the barricade would be hammered at, then another sprayed with gunfire. The wall was still holding strong, and it deflected most of the fire, but bullets were knocking chinks between the logs and occasionally hitting someone. Bud Royce’s knee had been shattered by a rifle bullet that way, but he was still hobbling around on the southern edge, his face bleached with pain.

  The word had gone out to save ammunition, but the supply was dwindling, and the enemy seemed to have enough to waste. Everyone knew that it was just a matter of time before the walls were stormed by massive force—but the question was: On what side would it come?

  All this Swan knew as she rode Mule across the cornfield. The heavy-laden stalks swayed as the wind hissed through them. In a clearing ahead was the largest of the bonfires, around which fifty or sixty people rested and ate hot soup ladled from steaming wooden buckets. She was on her way to check on the many wounded who’d been taken to shelter inside the shacks for Dr. Ryan to help, and as she passed the bonfire a silence fell over the people who’d gathered around it.

  She didn’t look at any of them. She couldn’t, because—even though she knew Sister was right—she felt as if she’d signed their death warrants. It was because of her that people were being killed, wounded and maimed, and if being a leader meant having to take that kind of burden, it was too heavy. She didn’t look at them, because she knew that many of them would be dead before daylight.

  A man shouted, “Don’t you worty! We won’t let the bastards in!”

  “When I run out of bullets,” another man vowed, “I’ll use my knife! And when that breaks, I’ve still got teeth!”