Swan Song

by Robert R. McCammon

  “We’ll stop ’em!” a woman called. “We’ll turn ’em back!”

  There were more shouts and calls of encouragement, and when Swan finally did look toward the bonfire, she saw the people watching her intently, some silhouetted by the flame and others illuminated by it, their eyes full of light and their faces strong and hopeful.

  “We ain’t afeared to die!” another woman said, and other voices agreed with her. “It’s quittin’ that scares the tar outta me, and by God, I ain’t a quitter!”

  Swan reined Mule in and sat staring at them. Her eyes filled with tears.

  The skinny black man who’d been so vehement at the town meeting approached her. His left arm was bound up with bloody cloth, but his eyes were fierce and courageous. “Don’t you cry, now!” he scolded her softly, when he got close enough. “It ain’t for you to be cryin’. Lord, no! If you ain’t strong, who’s gonna be?”

  Swan nodded and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Thank you,” she said.

  “Uh-uh! Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  He smiled wistfully. “For lettin’ me hear that sweet music again,” he said, and he nodded toward the cornfield.

  Swan knew what music he meant, because she could hear it, too: the wind moving between the rows and stalks like fingers brushing harp strings.

  “I was born right close to a cornfield,” he said. “Heard that music at night, just before I slept, and first thing in the mornin’ when I woke up. Didn’t think I’d ever hear it again, after them fellas messed everythin’ up.” He looked up at Swan. “I ain’t afraid to die now. Uh-uh! See, I always figured it’s better to die on your feet than live on your knees. I’m ready—and that’s my choice. So don’t you worry ’bout nothin’! Uh-uh!” He closed his eyes for a few seconds, and his frail body seemed to sway to the rhythm of the corn. Then he opened them again, and he said, “You take care now, hear?” He returned to the bonfire, offering his hands to the heat.

  Swan urged Mule forward, and the horse trotted across the field. As well as looking in on the wounded, Swan wanted to check on Josh; the last time she’d seen him, early that morning, he’d still been deep in a coma.

  She was almost across the field when bright flashes of light leaped over the eastern wall. Flames gouted, and mingled with the blasts was the high sewing-machine chatter of guns. Robin was on that side of the wall, she realized. She cried out, “Go!” and flicked the reins. Mule took off at a gallop.

  Behind her, at the western wall, Army of Excellence infantry and vehicles were surging from the woods. “Hold your fire!” Sister warned, but the people around her were already shooting, wasting ammunition. And then something hit the wall about fifteen yards away, and flames leaped, fire rippling over the icy glaze. Another object struck the wall a few yards closer; Sister heard glass shatter, and she smelled gasoline an instant before a burst of orange flame dazzled her. Bombs! she thought. They’re throwing bombs at the wall!

  People were shouting and firing in a bedlam of noise. Bottles full of gasoline, with wicks of flaming cloth jammed down into them, sailed over the wall and exploded amid the defenders. Glass broke almost at Sister’s feet, and she instinctively flung herself to the ground as a sheet of fiery gasoline spewed in all directions.

  On the eastern side, dozens of Molotov cocktails were being thrown over the wall. A man near Robin screamed as he was hit by flying glass and covered with flames. Someone else threw him to the ground, tried to put out the fire with snow and dirt. And then, through the maelstrom of leaping flames and explosions, machine gun, pistol and rifle bullets hit the wall so hard the logs jumped, and slugs ricocheted through gaps between them.

  “Let ’em have it!” Anna McClay thundered. The orange firelight showed her hundreds of soldiers between the wall and the forest, crawling forward, ducking into trenches, hiding behind wrecked vehicles and then firing or flinging their homemade bombs. As others around her fell back to get away from the flames, she shouted, “Stay where you are! Don’t run!” A woman to her left staggered and went down, and as Anna turned to retrieve the wounded woman’s gun a rifle bullet zipped through a hole in the wall and hit her in the side, knocking her to her knees. She tasted blood in her mouth and knew she’d bought the farm this time, but she stood up with a gun in each hand and lurched to the wall again.

  The storm of bombs and gunfire rose in intensity. A section of the wall was aflame, the wet wood popping and smoking. As bombs burst on all sides and glass fragments whirled through the turbulent air Robin kept his position at the wall, firing over it at the advancing soldiers. He hit two of them, and then a bomb exploded on the other side of the wall right in front of him. The heat and flying glass drove him back, and he tripped over the body of a dead man behind him.

  Blood streamed down his face from a gash at his hairline, and his skin felt seared. He wiped blood out of his eyes, and then he saw something that drove a freezing bolt of fear into his stomach.

  A metal claw attached to a heavy rope suddenly flew over the wall. The rope was drawn taut, and the tongs of the crude grappling hook dug between the logs. Another hook came over, lodging nearby; a third grappling hook was thrown, but it didn’t find a purchase and was rapidly reeled back to be tossed again. A fourth and a fifth grappling hook dug into the wall, and the soldiers started hauling at the ropes.

  Robin realized at once that the entire section of the wall, already weakened by bullets and flames, was about to be pulled down. More grappling hooks were coming over, their tongs jamming tightly between the logs, and as the ropes went taut the wall cracked like a rib cage being torn apart.

  He scrambled to his feet, ran toward the wall and grabbed one of the hooks, trying to wrench it loose. A few yards away, a husky, gray-bearded man was hacking at one of the ropes with an axe, and beside him a slim black woman was sawing at another rope with a butcher knife. Still the bottle bombs exploded along the wall, and more grappling hooks strained.

  To the right of Robin’s position, Anna McClay had emptied both of her guns, and now she saw the grappling hooks and ropes coming over the wall. She turned, looking for another weapon, heedless of the bullet in her side and a second in her right shoulder. Rolling a dead man over, she found a pistol, but there was no ammunition for it; then she discovered a meat cleaver that someone had dropped, and she used it to slash at the ropes. She cut through one and had almost severed a second when the top three feet of the wall was pulled down in a crash of logs and flames. A half-dozen soldiers rushed at her. “No!” she screamed, and she flung the cleaver at them. A fusillade of machine gun bullets spun her around in a macabre pirouette. As she fell to the ground her last thought was of a carnival ride called the Mad Mouse, its little rattling car rocketing around a bend in the tracks and taking off into the night sky, up and up with the fiery lights of the carnival burning in the earth below her and the wind whistling past her ears.

  She was dead before she came down.

  “They’re breaking through!” Robin heard someone shout—and then the wall in front of him collapsed with a noise like a human groan, and he was standing exposed in a space that a tractor-trailer truck could have driven through. A wave of soldiers was coming right at him, and he leaped aside an instant before bullets tore through the air.

  He aimed his rifle and shot the first soldier who rushed through. The others scurried back or hit the ground as Robin blasted away at them—and then his rifle was empty, and he couldn’t see the soldiers anymore for the smoke that whirled off the burning logs. He heard more cracks and groans as other sections of the wall were pulled down, and flames leaped high as the bombs exploded. He was aware of figures running all around him, some of them firing and falling. “Kill the sonsofbitches!” he heard a man shout off to the left, and then a figure in a grayish-green uniform ran out of the haze. Robin planted his feet, turned the rifle around to use it like a club and struck the soldier in the skull as the man passed him. The soldier fell, and Robin discarded his rifle in favor of th
e other man’s .45 automatic.

  A bullet sang past his head. Twenty feet away a bottle bomb exploded, and a woman with burning hair, her face a mask of blood, staggered out of the smoke; she fell before she got to Robin. He aimed at the figures flooding over the broken wall, firing the rest of the .45’s clip. Machine gun bullets plowed across the ground a few feet from him, and he knew there was nothing more he could do there. He had to get away, to find another place to defend from; the wall on the eastern side of Mary’s Rest was being destroyed, and soldiers were pouring through the holes.

  He ran toward town. Dozens of others were running as well, and the battlefield was littered with the bodies of the dead and wounded. Small bands of people had stopped to make their own desperate stands, but they were quickly shot down or scattered. Robin looked back and saw two armored cars coming through the smoke, their turret guns flashing fire.

  “Robin! Robin!” someone was calling over the chaos. He recognized the voice as Swan’s, and he knew she must be somewhere close.

  “Swan!” he shouted. “Over here!”

  She heard Robin’s answer and wheeled Mule to the left, in the direction she thought his voice had come from. The smoke stung her eyes, made it almost impossible to see the faces of people until they were a few feet away. Explosions were still blasting just ahead, and Swan knew the enemy soldiers had broken through the eastern wall. She saw that people were wounded and bleeding, but they were stopping to turn and fire the last of their bullets; still others, armed only with axes, knives and shovels, ran forward to fight at close quarters.

  A bomb exploded nearby, and a man screamed. Mule reared up on his hind legs and pawed the air. When he came down again, he kept sideslipping as if one half of him wanted to run in one direction and the other half the opposite way. “Robin!” she shouted. “Where are you?”

  “Over here!” He still couldn’t see her. He tripped over the corpse of a man whose chest was riddled with bullet holes; the dead man was grasping an axe, and Robin spent a few precious seconds working it loose from the hand.

  When he stood up, he was face to face with a horse—and it was a toss-up as to who was most startled. Mule whinnied and reared again, wanting to break loose and run, but Swan quickly got him under control. She saw Robin’s blood-smeared face and held out her hand to him. “Get on! Hurry!”

  He grasped her hand and pulled himself up behind her. Swan kicked her heels into Mule’s flanks, wheeled him toward town and let him run.

  They came out of the thick smoke, and Swan suddenly reined Mule in. He obeyed, his hooves plowing into the ground. From this position, Swan and Robin could see fighting going on all around Mary’s Rest; fires blazed on the southern side, and over on the west they saw soldiers streaming through huge holes in the wall, followed by more armored cars and trucks. The noise of gunfire, shouting and screaming was whipped back and forth in the wind—and at that instant Swan knew Mary’s Rest had fallen.

  She had to find Sister, and fast. Her face tight and strained and her teeth clenched with anger, Swan urged Mule forward.

  Mule started running like a thoroughbred, his head held low and his ears laid back.

  There was a high chattering noise, and hot currents of air seemed to sweep around her. Swan felt Mule shudder and heard him grunt as if he’d been kicked, and then Mule’s legs went out from under him. The horse fell, throwing Robin free but trapping Swan’s left leg under him. The breath was knocked out of Swan, and she lay stunned as Mule desperately tried to stand up. But Robin had already seen the bullet holes in Mule’s belly, and he knew the horse was finished.

  An engine growled. He looked up and saw a Chevy Nova with an armored windshield and a rooftop gun turret coming. He bent to Swan’s side and tried to pull her free, but her leg was firmly pinned. Mule was still struggling to get up, steam and blood spraying from his nostrils, his sides heaving. His eyes were wide with terror.

  The Chevy’s gun turret fired, and bullets ripped across the ground dangerously near Swan. Robin realized with sickening certainty that he didn’t have the strength to free her. The armored car’s radiator grinned like a mouthful of metal teeth. Robin’s grip tightened around the axe handle.

  Swan grasped his hand. “Don’t leave me,” she said, dazed and unaware that Mule was dying on top of her.

  Robin had already decided. He pulled free and sprinted toward the armored car.

  “Robin!” she cried out, and then she lifted her head and saw where he was going.

  He zigzagged as the turret’s gun chattered again. Bullets kicked up snow and dirt at his heels. The Chevy veered toward him and away from Swan, just as he’d hoped it would. Move your lazy ass! he told himself as he dove to the ground, rolled and scrambled up again to throw off the gunner’s aim. The Chevy picked up speed, steadily closing the range. He jinked to both sides, heard the machine gun speak and saw the hot streaks of slugs zip through the air. Oh, shit! he thought as a searing pain ripped across his left thigh; he knew he’d been tagged, but it wasn’t too bad, and he kept going. The armored car followed him into the smoke.

  On the northern perimeter, Paul Thorson and forty other men and women were surrounded by soldiers. Paul had only two bullets left, and most of the others had run out of ammunition a long time before; they wielded clubs, pickaxes and shovels and dared the soldiers to charge.

  A Jeep pulled up behind the protective barrier of AOE infantry, and Colonel Macklin rose to his feet. His coat was draped over his shoulders, and the deep-set eyes in his skeletal face fixed on the group of defenders who’d been pushed back against the wall. “Is she with them?” he asked the man occupying the rear seat.

  Friend stood up. He wore an Army of Excellence uniform and a gray cap pulled over his thin, dark brown hair; today his face was plain and nondescript, soulless and without character. His watery hazel eyes ticked back and forth for a few seconds. “No,” he said finally, in a toneless voice, “she’s not with them.” He sat back down again.

  “Kill them all,” Macklin told the soldiers. Then he ordered his driver on as the Army of Excellence troops sprayed the trapped men and women with machine gun bullets. Among them, Paul squeezed off a shot and saw one of the soldiers stagger—and then he himself was hit in the stomach, and a second bullet broke his collarbone. He fell on his face, tried to get up and shivered as a third and fourth bullet hit his side and pierced his forearm. He pitched forward and lay still.

  Three hundred yards away, the armored Chevy Nova was searching through the smoke, its turret gun firing at every hint of motion. The tires crunched over corpses, but one of the bodies that lay sprawled on the ground suddenly pulled in his arms and legs as the vehicle passed right over him.

  When the armored car had cleared his body, Robin sat up and grasped the axe that had been hidden underneath him. He stood up, took three running strides and jumped onto the Nova’s rear fender. He kept going until he stood on the roof—and then he lifted the axe and smashed it down with all his strength on the sheet metal turret.

  It crumpled inward, and the gunner tried to swivel his weapon, but Robin jammed it by placing his boot against the barrel. He battered down on the turret, his axe ripping through the sheet metal and slamming into the gunner’s skull. There was a strangled cry of agony, and the driver put his foot down on the accelerator. As the Nova shot forward Robin was thrown off the roof to the ground; he’d lost his grip on the axe, and when he scrambled to his feet he could see the axe’s handle still sticking rigidly up in the air, its business end about two inches deep in the gunner’s head. Robin expected the car to come at him again, but the driver had panicked, veering erratically. The Nova kept going and disappeared in the smoke.

  Mule was dying, steam rising from his nostrils and the bullet holes in his belly. Swan’s head had cleared enough for her to realize what had happened, but she knew there was nothing she could do. Mule still twitched, as if trying to stand with willpower alone. Swan saw more soldiers coming, and she pulled at her leg, but it was jammed t
ight.

  Suddenly someone bent down beside her and worked his arms under Mule’s side. Swan heard the muscles and sinews crack in his shoulders as he heaved upward, supporting some of the horse’s weight and easing the terrible pressure on Swan’s leg.

  “Pull yourself out!” he said, his voice strained with the effort. “Hurry!”

  She wrenched at her leg and worked it a few more inches toward freedom. Then Mule shifted again, as if using his last strength to help, and with an effort that almost dislocated her thigh from its socket she pulled her leg out. The stinging blood immediately rushed back into it, and she gritted her teeth as the pain hit her.

  The man withdrew his arms. His hands were blotched with white and brown pigment.

  She looked up into Josh’s face.

  His skin had returned to its rich, dark umber color. He had a short gray beard, and almost all of his tight cap of hair had turned white. But his nose, which had been broken so many times and been so misshapen, was straight-bridged and strong again, and the old scars of football and wrestling had been wiped clean. His cheekbones were high and sharp, as if chiseled from dark stone, and his eyes were a soft shade of gray that shone with the translucent wonder of a child.

  She thought that, next to Robin, he was the most handsome man she’d ever seen.

  Josh saw the soldiers coming, and adrenaline pumped through his body; he’d left Glory and Aaron in the house to search for Swan, and now he had to get all of them to safety. Where Sister was he didn’t know, but he understood all too well that the soldiers were breaking through the walls on all sides of Mary’s Rest, and soon they’d be in the alleys, setting the shacks on fire. He picked Swan up in his arms, his sprained shoulder and his ribs aflame with pain.

  At that instant, Mule’s body trembled and a burst of steam came from the horse’s nostrils, pluming up into the sky like a tired soul finding release—and Josh knew that no beast of burden deserved rest as much as Mule. There would never be another horse as fine, or as beautiful.