Swan Song

by Robert R. McCammon

  Sister watched as Sheila hurriedly unzipped the satchel.

  Sheila reached into it, and her hand came out gripping the circle of glass.

  Dark blue fire rippled through it, brightened for a few seconds and then faded away. The somber blue picked up Sheila’s rapid heartbeat. “It’s brighter today!” Sheila said, her fingers gently caressing the glass. Only one of the glass spikes remained. “Don’t you think it’s brighter today?”

  “Yes,” Swan agreed. “I think it is.”

  “Oh ... it’s pretty. So pretty.” She held it out to Sister. “Make it be bright!”

  Sister took it, and as her hand closed on its cool surface the jewels flared and fire burned along the embedded filaments.

  Sheila stared at it, transfixed, and in its wonderful glow her face lost its hardness, the lines and cracks softening, the toil of the years falling away. She’d done just as Sister had said that first night. She’d gone out into the field and searched for the grave marker that said RUSTY WEATHERS. Trucks and armored cars were rolling over the field, and soldiers called mockingly to her, but none of them bothered her. At first she couldn’t find the marker, and she’d wandered back and forth across the field in search of it. But she’d kept looking until she’d found it, still planted in the earth but leaning crazily to one side and all but ripped loose. Tire tracks had zigzagged all around it, and there was a dead man lying near it with most of his face shot away. She’d gotten down on her knees and begun to dig through the churned-up dirt. And then, finally, she’d seen the edge of the leather satchel sticking up, and she’d worked it loose. She had not opened the satchel but had hidden it up under her coat so no one would take it from her. Then she’d done the last thing that Sister had said: She’d pulled the marker out of the ground and had taken it far away from where it originally was, and there she’d left it lying in the mud.

  And keeping the satchel in the folds of her heavy coat and hiding her muddy hands, she’d returned to her trailer. One of the guards had called out, “Hey, Sheila! Didja get paid, or was it another freebie?” The other one had tried to grab at her breasts, but Sheila had gotten inside and shut the door in his leering face.

  “So pretty,” Sheila whispered as she watched the jewels shine. “So pretty.”

  Sister knew that Sheila was entranced by the circle of glass, and she’d kept their secret very well. During the time they’d been together, Sheila had told Sister and Swan about her life before the seventeenth of July, and how she and Rudy had been attacked by Colonel Macklin and Roland Croninger in the dirtwart land, on the edge of the Great Salt Lake. She didn’t hear the infant crying much anymore, and Rudy no longer crawled after her in her nightmares; whenever the baby did start to cry, Swan was always there, and she made the baby stop.

  “So pretty,” she whispered.

  Sister stared at her for a moment—and then she snapped off the last glass spike. “Here,” she said, and it rippled with bright emerald green and sapphire blue as she held it toward Sheila. The other woman just looked at it. “Take it,” Sister offered. “It’s yours.”

  “Mine?”

  “That’s right. I don’t know what’s ahead for us. I don’t know where we’ll be tomorrow—or a week from tomorrow. But I want you to have this. Take it.”

  Slowly, Sheila lifted her hand. She hesitated, and Sister said, “Go ahead.” Then Sheila took it, and at once the colors darkened again to the somber blue. But down deep inside the glass there was a small ruby-red glint, like the flame of a candle. “Thank you ... thank you,” Sheila said, almost overcome. It didn’t occur to her that it would have been worth many hundreds of thousands of dollars in the world that had used to be. She lovingly moved her fingers over the tiny red glint. “It’ll get brighter, won’t it?” she asked hopefully.

  “Yes,” Sister replied. “I think it will.”

  And then Sister turned her attention to Swan, and she knew it was time.

  She remembered something the Junkman had told her, when he’d wanted to see what was inside the satchel: “Can’t hold onto things forever. Got to pass them along.”

  She knew what the circle of glass was. Had known it for a long time. Now, with the last spire broken off, it was even more clear. Beth Phelps had known, long ago in the ruined church, when it had reminded her of the Statue of Liberty: “It could be a crown, couldn’t it?” Beth had asked.

  The man with the scarlet eye had realized, as well, when he’d asked her where it was: “The ring. The crown,” he’d said.

  The crown.

  And Sister knew to whom that crown belonged. She’d known it ever since she’d found Swan in Mary’s Rest and seen the new corn growing.

  Can’t hold onto things forever, she thought. But oh, she wanted to so very, very badly. The glass crown had become her life; it had lifted her off her feet and made her go on, one step at a time, through the nightmare land. She’d clung to the crown with the jealous fervor of a New York City bag lady, and she’d both shed and taken blood to protect it.

  And now it was time. Yes. Now it was time.

  Because for her the dreamwalk path had ended. When she looked into the glass, she saw beautiful jewels and threads of gold and silver, but nothing more. Her dreamwalking was done.

  It was for Swan to take the next step.

  Sister got up off the mattress and approached Swan, holding the shining circle of glass before her. Swan realized it was the image she’d seen in Rusty’s magic mirror. “Stand up,” Sister said, and her voice quavered.

  Swan did.

  “This belongs to you,” Sister said. “It always belonged to you. I’ve just been its keeper.” Her fingers traced a filament of platinum, and it sizzled within the glass. “But I want you to remember one thing, and hold it fast: If a miracle can make sand into something like this ... then just think—just dream—of what people can be.” And she placed the crown on Swan’s head.

  It was a perfect fit.

  Golden light suddenly flared around the crown, receded and flared again. The brilliant glow made both Sister and Sheila squint, and down deep within the gold more colors bloomed like a garden in sunlight.

  Sheila put a hand to her mouth; her eyes overflowed, and she began laughing and crying at the same time as the colors washed over her face.

  Sister felt heat radiating from the glass, as startling and strong as if she’d caught a faceful of sun. It was getting so bright that she had to retreat a step, her hand rising to shield her eyes.

  “What’s happening?” Swan asked, aware of the brightness and a tingling sensation of warmth in her scalp. She was getting scared, and she started to take the crown off, but Sister said, “No! Don’t touch it!”

  The golden, fiery light had begun to ripple through Swan’s hair. Swan stood as rigidly as if balancing a book on her head, scared to death but excited, too.

  The golden light flared again, and in the next instant Swan’s hair seemed to be on fire. The light was spreading over her forehead and cheeks in tendrils, and then Swan’s face became a mask of light—a wonderful and terrifying sight that almost knocked Sister to her knees. The fierce glow spread over Swan’s throat and neck and began to wind like golden smoke around her shoulders and arms, rippling down over her hands and around each finger.

  Sister reached toward Swan; her hand entered the radiance and touched Swan’s cheek—but it felt like armor plate, though she could still see the faint impression of Swan’s features and the girl’s eyes. Sister’s fingers could not reach Swan’s skin—not her cheeks, her chin, her forehead—not anywhere.

  Oh, God, Sister thought—because she’d realized the crown was weaving an armor of light around Swan’s body.

  It had covered her almost to the waist. Swan felt as if she were standing at the center of a torch, but the warmth was not unpleasant, and she saw the fiery reflection on the walls and the faces of Sister and Sheila with vision only slightly tinged golden. She looked down at her arms, saw them ablaze; she curled her fingers, and they felt fine
—no pain, no stiffness, no sense of anything around them at all. The light moved with her, cleaving to her flesh like a second skin. The fire had begun to crawl down her legs.

  She moved, cocooned by light, to the mirror. The sight of what she was becoming was too much for her. She reached up, grasped the crown and lifted it off her head.

  The golden glow faded almost at once. It pulsed ... pulsed ... and the armor of light evaporated like drifting mist.

  Then Swan was as she’d been before, just a girl holding a ring of sparkling glass.

  She couldn’t find her voice for a minute. Then she held the crown to Sister, and said, “I ... I think ... you’d better keep it for me.”

  Slowly, Sister lifted her hand and accepted it. She returned the crown to the satchel and zipped it up. Then, moving like a sleepwalker, she pulled up the blanket and put the satchel back in the mattress. But her eyes still buzzed with golden fire, and as long as she lived she’d never forget what she’d just witnessed.

  She wondered what might have happened if, as an experiment, she’d balled up her fist and tried to strike Swan in the face. She didn’t want to suffer broken knuckles to find out. Would the armor have turned away the blade of a knife? A bullet? A bomb’s shrapnel?

  Of all the powers the circle of glass held, she knew that this was one of the greatest—and it had been saved for Swan alone.

  Sheila held her own piece of the crown up before her face. The red glint was stronger; she was sure of it. She got up and hid that in the mattress, too.

  And perhaps thirty seconds later, there was a loud banging at the door. “Sheila!” a guard called. “We’re getting ready to move out!”

  “Yeah,” she answered. “Yeah. We’re ready.”

  “Everything okay in there?”

  “Yeah. Fine.”

  “I’ll be driving the rig today. We’ll be hitting the road in about fifteen minutes.” A chain rattled as it was being fastened around the doorknob and across the door; then there was the solid click of a padlock. “Now you’re nice and tight.”

  “Thanks, Danny!” Sheila said, and when the guard had gone Sheila knelt on the floor beside Swan and pressed the girl’s hand against her cheek.

  But Swan was lost in thought. Her mind had turned to the visions of green fields and orchards. Were those images of things that would be, or things that could be? Were they visions of the prison farm, the fields tended by slaves and stuttering machines, or were they places free of barbed wire and brutality?

  She didn’t know, but she understood that each mile they traveled brought her closer to the answer, whatever it was to be.

  In Macklin’s Command Center, preparations were being made to get underway. The fuel allocation reports from the Mechanical Brigade lay on his desk, and Roland stood next to Friend in front of the West Virginia map tacked to the wall. A red line marked their progress along Highway 60. Roland got as close to Friend as he could; he was tortured with fever, and the cold that came off the other man comforted him. Last night the pain in his face had almost driven him crazy, and he swore he’d felt the bones shift under the bandages.

  “We’re down to nine drums,” Macklin said. “If we don’t find any more gasoline, we’re going to have to start leaving vehicles behind.” He looked up from his reports. “That goddamned mountain road’ll make the engines strain. They’ll use more gas. I still say we give it up and go find fuel.”

  They didn’t answer.

  “Did you hear me? We’ve got to have more gas before we start up that—”

  “What’s wrong with ’Nel Macreen today?” Friend turned toward him, and Macklin saw with a start of horror that the man’s face had changed again; the eyes were slits, the hair black and plastered down. His flesh was pale yellow—and Macklin was looking at a mask that took him back to Vietnam and the pit where the Cong guards had dropped their refuse on him. ’Nel Macreen gots a plobrem?”

  Macklin’s tongue had turned to lead.

  Friend came toward him, his Vietnamese face grinning. “Onry plobrem ’Nel Macreen gots is gettin’ us where we wants go.” His accent changed from pidgin English back to a husky American voice. “So you get rid of the trucks and shit. So what?”

  “So ... we can’t carry as many soldiers or supplies if we leave trucks behind. I mean ... we’re losing strength every day.”

  “Well, what do you say we do, then?” Friend pulled another chair toward him, turned it around and sat down with his arms crossed on the chair’s back. “Where do we go to find gasoline?”

  “I ... don’t know. We’ll have to search for—”

  “You don’t know. And so far the towns you’ve raided were zero for gas, right? So you want to backtrack and fuck around until every truck and car is running on empty?” He cocked his head to one side. “What do you say, Roland?”

  Roland’s heart jumped every time Friend addressed him. The fever had slowed his mind, and his body felt sluggish and heavy. He was still the King’s Knight, but he’d been wrong about something: Colonel Macklin was not the King, and neither was he his own King. Oh, no—the man who sat in the chair before Macklin’s desk was the King. The undisputed, the one and only King, who did not eat or drink and whom he’d never seen either crap or piss either, as if he didn’t have time for such mundane things.

  “I say we keep going on.” Roland knew many armored cars and trucks had already been left behind; the tank had broken down two days out of Mary’s Rest, and several million dollars worth of Uncle Sam’s machinery had been abandoned on the Missouri roadside. “We go on. We’ve got to find out what’s on that mountain.”

  “Why?” Macklin asked. “What’s it to us? I say we—”

  “Silence,” Friend commanded. The slitted Vietnamese eyes bored into him. “Must we go around about this again, Colonel? Roland feels that Brother Timothy saw an underground complex on Warwick Mountain, complete with an operating electrical supply and a mainframe computer. Now, why’s the power still on up there, and what purpose does the complex serve? I agree with Roland that we should find out.”

  “There might be some gasoline up there, too,” Roland added.

  “Right. So going to Warwick Mountain might solve your problem. Yes?”

  Macklin kept his gaze averted. In his mind he saw the girl’s face again, achingly beautiful. He saw her face at night, when he closed his eyes, like a vision from another world. He could not stand his own smell when he awakened. “Yes,” he answered, in a small, quiet voice.

  “I kneeewww you’d see the light, brotha!” Friend said, in the high, careening voice of a Southern revival preacher.

  A ripping noise made Friend’s head swivel.

  Roland was falling; he’d reached out for support and was taking half the map with him. He hit the floor.

  Friend giggled. “Fall down go boom.”

  In that instant Macklin almost lunged forward and slammed the palm of his right hand into the monster’s skull, almost drove the nails deep into the head of the beast that had taken his army from him and made him into a snuffling coward—but as the thought thrilled through him and he tensed for action, a small slit opened in the back of Friend’s head, about four inches above the nape of the neck.

  In the slit was a staring scarlet eye with a silver pupil.

  Macklin sat very still, his lips drawn back from his teeth in a grimace.

  The scarlet eye suddenly shriveled and disappeared, and Friend’s head turned toward him again. He was smiling cordially. “Please don’t take me for a fool,” he said.

  Something hit the roof of the Airstream trailer: bump! Then another: bump bump! Followed in the next few seconds by a bumping noise that seemed to sweep the length of the trailer and gently rock it from side to side,

  Macklin got up on rubbery legs and went around the desk to the door. He opened it and stood looking out at golf ball-sized hail whirling down from the leaden sky, bumping and clattering on the windshields, hoods and roofs of the other vehicles parked around. Thunder echoed in the c
louds like a bass drum in a barrel, and an electric-blue spear of lightning struck somewhere in the distant mountains. In the next minute the hail stopped, and sheets of black, cold rain began falling over the encampment.

  A boot thrust out and hit him in the small of the back. He lost his balance and tumbled down to the bottom of the steps, where the armed guards stared at him in stunned surprise.

  Macklin sat up on his knees as the rain struck him in the face and crawled through his hair.

  Friend stood in the doorway. “You’re riding in the truck with the driver,” he announced. “This is my trailer now.”

  “Shoot him!” Macklin bawled. “Shoot the bastard!”

  The guards hesitated; one of them lifted his M-16 and took aim.

  “You’ll die in three seconds,” the monster promised.

  The guard wavered, looked down at Macklin and then looked at Friend again. He abruptly lowered the rifle and stepped back, rubbing rain from his eyes.

  “Help the colonel out of the rain,” Friend commanded. “Then spread the word: We’re moving out in ten minutes. Anyone who’s not ready will be left behind.” He closed the door.

  Macklin shrugged off help as he got to his feet. “It’s mine!” he shouted. “You won’t take it from me!”

  The door remained shut.

  “You won’t ... take it ... from me,” Macklin said, but no one was listening anymore.

  Engines began to mutter and growl like awakening beasts. The smell of gasoline and exhaust was in the air, and the rain reeked of brimstone.

  “You won’t,” Macklin whispered, and then he started walking toward the truck that hauled the Command Center as the rain beat down like hammer blows on his shoulders.

  90

  THE ARMY OF EXCELLENCE left a trail of broken-down armored cars, trucks and trailers in its wake as it turned north onto Highway 219 and began to climb along the steep western ridge of the Allegheny Mountains.

  The land was covered with dead forests, and an occasional ghost town crumbled alongside the ribbon of road. There were no people, but a scouting party in a Jeep pursued and shot two deer near the ruins of Friars Hill—and they came across something else that was worth reporting: an ebony, frozen lake. At its center was the tail section of a large aircraft jutting up from the depths. Two of the scouts started across the lake to investigate it, but the ice cracked under them, and they drowned crying for help.