Swan Song

by Robert R. McCammon

  Still Roland didn’t move. Friend laughed quietly, and ‘God’ was waiting for them about ten yards beyond Swan and Sister.

  Slowly, Roland took the pistol away from Macklin’s head. “Give ... me your gun ... sir,” he said.

  Macklin removed it from his holster and flung it to the ground, and then he stood up and got out of the Jeep—but unhurriedly, at his own pace.

  “Let’s go, kiddies,” Friend said. He motioned toward Swan and Sister with the machine gun, and they followed ‘God’ to the metal-roofed building.

  Inside, it was apparent that the building was nothing more than a huge shed protecting the entrance to the Warwick Mountain coal mine. The floor was of hard-packed dirt, and a few naked light bulbs that hung from the ceiling gave off a dirty yellow illumination. Bundles of cables and wires lay around, as well as old pieces of steel track, piles of rotting timber and other bits of refuse that suggested Warwick Mountain had once boasted a thriving coal business. A steel stairway ascended to a series of catwalks, and at the far end of the building, where the structure abutted Warwick Mountain, was the dark square of the mine’s entrance.

  ‘God’ led them up the stairway and along one of the catwalks to the mine shaft. A few light bulbs gave off a meager yellow glow within the mine, which slanted downward at a steep angle. Resting on tracks inside the shaft was a large wire mesh cage about six feet high and four feet wide, its wheels like those of a railroad car. Inside it were padded benches and straps to hold the riders in place. ‘God’ opened the rear of the cage and waited for them to enter it.

  “I’m not getting in that damned thing!” Sister balked. “Where are you taking us?”

  “Down there.” ‘God’ pointed along the mine shaft, and the yellow light winked off something metallic in the sleeve of his blue-checked shirt. Sister realized the old man was wearing cufflinks. He looked at Friend. “Isn’t that where you want to go?”

  “What’s in there?” Roland asked, all his bluff and bluster gone.

  “The power source you’re looking for. And other things you might be interested in seeing. Do you want to go or not?”

  “You get in first,” Friend told him.

  “A-OK.” ‘God’ turned toward the rock wall, where there was a panel with two buttons on it, one red and the other green. He punched the green button, and the sound of humming machinery echoed up the shaft. Then he climbed into the cage, sat down on one of the benches and buckled himself in. “All aboard!” he said cheerfully. “We’ll start moving in ten seconds.”

  Friend was the last one in. He crouched at the rear of the cage, his face averted from Swan’s. The machinery got steadily louder, and then there were four clicks as the brakes on each wheel disengaged. The cage began to descend along the tracks, its speed restrained by a steel cable that had snapped taut and was reeling out behind it.

  “We’re going down more than three hundred feet,” ‘God’ explained. “This used to be a working mine about thirty years ago. Then the United States government bought it. Of course, all this rock is reinforced with concrete and steel.” He waved his arm at the walls and roof, and Sister saw the cuff link glitter again. Only this time she was close enough to see that it looked very familiar, and it had writing on it. “You’d be amazed to know what the engineers can do,” he continued. “They put in ventilation ducts and air pumps, and even the light bulbs are supposed to last for seven or eight years. But they’re starting to burn out now. Some of the same people who put this place together worked on Disney World.”

  Sister caught his sleeve and looked closer at the cuff link.

  On it was a very recognizable blue, white and gold emblem, and the much-polished lettering said: Seal of the President of the United States of America.

  Her fingers had gone numb, and she let his arm go. He stared impassively at her. “What’s ... down in here?” she asked him.

  “Talons,” he said. “The talons of Heaven.” They went through a long area where there were burned-out light bulbs, and when they approached the illumination again, the President’s eyes burned with inner fever as he stared across the cage at Friend. “You want to see a power source?” he asked, his breath wisping out in the chilly air. “You will. Oh, yes; I promise you will.”

  In another minute the brakes engaged again and shrieked along the tracks as the conveyance shuddered and slowed. It bumped against a thick foam rubber barrier and stopped.

  The President unbuckled his seat belt, opened the front section of the cage and stepped out. “This way,” he said, motioning them on like a demented tour guide.

  Roland shoved Swan ahead of him, and they entered a passageway that led off to the right of the tracks. Bulbs burned fitfully overhead, and suddenly the passageway ended at a wall of rough-edged rocks.

  “It’s blocked!” Roland said. “It’s a dead end!”

  But Friend shook his head; he’d already seen the small black box embedded in the rock wall at about chest height. The upper half of the black box seemed to be some sort of display screen, while the bottom was a keyboard.

  The President reached up to his throat with his good hand and lifted off a braided length of leather that had been hanging around his neck. On it were several keys—and the President chose one that was small and silver. He kissed it, and then he started to insert it into a lock in the black box.

  “Hold it!” Friend said. “What does that thing do?”

  “It opens the door,” the man replied; he fit the key into the lock and twisted it to the left. Instantly, pale green letters appeared on the screen: HELLO! ENTER CODE WITHIN FIVE SECONDS. Swan and Sister watched as the President punched three letters on the keyboard: AOK. CODE ACCEPTED, the screen replied, HAVE A NICE DAY!

  Electric tumblers whirred, and there was the muffled sound of locks opening in rapid-fire succession. The false wall of rock cracked open like the door of a massive vault, hissing on hydraulic hinges. The President pulled it wide enough to admit them, and clean white light glowed from the room beyond. Roland started to reach up for the silver key, but the old man said, “No! Leave that alone! If it’s disturbed while the door’s open, the floor’s electrified.”

  Roland’s fingers stopped an inch away from the key.

  “You go first.” Friend shoved the man through the opening. Sister and Swan were pushed in. Macklin followed, then Roland and finally the man with the scarlet eye.

  They all squinted in the bright light of a white-walled, antiseptic-looking chamber where six mainframe computers quietly conversed, their data tapes slowly turning behind windows of tinted glass. The floor was coated with black rubber, and there was the polite rumble of the air-purifying system drawing cleansed air through small metal grilles in the walls. At the center of the room, sitting atop a rubber-coated table and connected by thick bundles of cables to the mainframe computers, was another small black box with a keyboard, about the size of a telephone.

  Roland was delirious at the sight of the machines. It had been so long since he’d seen a computer, he’d forgotten how beautiful they were; to him, the mainframes were the Ferraris of computers, pulsing brain matter squished into sleek plastic and metal skins. He could almost hear them breathing.

  “Welcome to my home,” the President said—and then he walked to a metal panel on the wall. There was a small lever that you could fit your finger into and pull upward on, and above it a little red plastic DANGER sign. He hooked his finger into the lever’s notch and wrenched it up.

  The door slammed shut, and instantly the electronic locks bolted themselves. On this side of the false wall was a sheet of stainless steel.

  Swan and Sister had turned to face him. Friend had his finger on the machine gun’s trigger, and Macklin stood staring numbly at the old man.

  “There,” the President said. “There.” He stepped back from the metal panel, nodding with satisfaction.

  “Open that door!” Macklin demanded, his flesh crawling. The walls were closing in on him, and this place was too much like Ear
th House. “I don’t like to be shut up! Get that damned door open!”

  “It’s locked,” the other man replied.

  “Open it!” Macklin shouted.

  “Please open it,” Swan said.

  The President shook his gray-maned head. “I’m sorry, child. Once you lock the door from in here, it’s locked for good. I lied about the key. I just didn’t want him to pull it out. See, you can open it from the inside if you have the silver key. But now the computer’s locked it—and there’s no way out.”

  “Why?” Sister asked, her eyes wide. “Why’d you lock us in here?”

  “Because we’re going to stay here until we die. The talons of Heaven are going to destroy all the evil ... every bit of it. The world will be cleansed, and the world can begin again—fresh and new. You see?”

  Colonel Macklin attacked the stainless steel door, hammering at it with his good hand. The insulation in the room soaked up the noise like a sponge, and Macklin couldn’t even put a dent in the steel. The door had no handles, nothing to grab hold of. He turned on the old man and charged at him with his deadly right hand upraised for a killing blow.

  But before Macklin reached him, Friend stopped the colonel with a short, sharp blow to the throat. Macklin gagged and fell to his knees, his eyes bright with terror.

  “No,” Friend said, like an adult chastising a naughty child. Then he lifted his gaze to the old man. “What is this place? What are these machines for, and where’s the power coming from?”

  “Those gather information from satellites.” The President motioned toward the mainframes. “I know what space looks like. I’ve looked down on the earth. I used to believe ... it was such a good place.” He blinked slowly as the memory of falling through the flaming whirlwind again stirred like a recurrent nightmare. “I fell to earth from Heaven. Yes. I fell. And I came here, because I knew I was close to this place. There were two men here, but they’re not here now. They had food and water, enough to last them for years. I think ... one of them died. I don’t know what happened to the other one. He just... went away.” He paused for a moment, and then his mind cleared again. He stared at the black box on the rubber-coated table and approached it reverently. “This,” he said, “will bring down the talons of Heaven.”

  “The talons of Heaven? What’s that mean?”

  “Talons,” the President said, as if the other man should know. “Tactical Long Range Nuclear Sanitizer. Watch—and listen.” He punched his code into the keyboard: AOK.

  The mainframes began to spin their data tapes faster. Roland watched, fascinated.

  A woman’s voice—soft and seductive, as cool as balm on an open wound—filtered through speakers in the walls: “Hello, Mr. President. I’m waiting for your instructions.”

  The voice reminded Sister of a New York social worker who’d politely explained that there was no more room in the Women’s Shelter on a freezing January night.

  The President typed, Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks, the lady of situations.

  “Here is the man with three staves, and here the wheel,” the disembodied computer voice answered.

  “Wow!” Roland breathed.

  And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card

  “Which is blank, is something he carries on his back”

  The President typed, Which I am forbidden to see.

  “What are you doing?” Sister shouted, close to panic. Swan squeezed her hand.

  I do not find The Hanged Man, the President typed into the black box.

  “Fear death by water,” the feminine voice replied. There was a pause, then: “Talons armed, sir. Ten seconds to abort.”

  He pressed two letters on the keyboard: No.

  “Initial abort sequence denied. Talons firing procedure activated, sir.” The voice was as cool as the memory of lemonade on a scorching August afternoon. “Talons will be in target range in thirteen minutes and forty-eight seconds.” Then the computer voice was silent.

  “What’s happened?” Friend was keenly interested. “What’d you do?”

  “In thirteen minutes and forty-eight seconds,” the President said, “two satellites will enter the atmosphere over the North Pole and Antarctica. Those satellites are nuclear missile platforms that will each fire thirty twenty-five-megaton warheads into the ice caps.” He glanced over at Swan and looked quickly away, because her beauty made him yearn. “The blasts will throw the earth off its axis and melt the ice. The world will be cleansed, don’t you see? All the evil will be washed away by the talons of Heaven—and someday things will start over again, and they’ll be good, like they used to be.” His face wrinkled with pain. “We lost the war,” he said. “We lost—and now we have to start all over again.”

  “A ... Doomsday machine,” Friend whispered, and a grin skittered across his mouth. The grin stretched into a laugh, and the eyes danced with malignant glee. “A Doomsday machine!” he shouted. “Oh, yes! The world must be cleansed! All the Evil must be washed away! Like her!” He pointed a finger at Swan.

  “The last of the Good must die with the Evil,” the President replied. “Must die, so the world can be reborn.”

  “No . .. no ...” Macklin croaked, clutching at his bruised throat.

  Friend laughed, and he directed his attention to Sister, though he really spoke to Swan. “I told you!” he crowed. “I told you I’d make a human hand do the work!”

  The cool feminine voice said, “Thirteen minutes to detonation.”

  93

  JOSH AND ROBIN CAME upon the dead soldier at the broken-open gate, and Josh bent down beside the corpse. Robin heard a hissing, sputtering noise but couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. He reached out to touch the chain link fence.

  “No!” Josh said sharply—and Robin’s fingers stopped just short of the metal mesh. “Look at this.” Josh opened the dead man’s right hand, and Robin could see the chain link design burned into the corpse’s flesh.

  They went through the opening where the gate had been, while the fence’s broken connections hissed like a nest of vipers. It was raining harder, and gray sheets of water whipped through the dead trees on either side of the road. Both of them were drenched and shivering, and the torn-up surface beneath them alternately gripped their boots in mud and then skidded them over icy patches. They moved as fast as they could, because both of them knew that Swan and Sister were somewhere ahead, at the mercy of the man with the scarlet eye, and they sensed time ticking rapidly toward the final hour.

  Coming around a curve, Josh stopped, and Robin heard him say, “Damn it!”

  Three soldiers, all but obscured by the rain, were descending the road and heading right at them. Two of them saw Josh and Robin and stopped less than ten yards away; the third kept going a few more steps until he stopped as well and gaped stupidly at the two figures in front of him.

  Perhaps four seconds passed, and Josh thought he and the others had frozen into lead-boned statues. He couldn’t figure out what to do—and suddenly the choice was made for him.

  Like two bands of rival gunfighters meeting on a street at high noon, they started shooting without taking aim, and the next few seconds were a blur of motion, nerve-frazzling panic and flashes of gunfire as bullets screamed toward their targets.

  “Ten minutes to detonation,” the voice announced, and it struck Sister that the woman who’d made that tape was probably long dead.

  “Stop it,” Swan said to the scarred man who’d once been the President of the United States. “Please.” Her face was calm but for the rapid beating of a pulse at her temple. “You’re wrong. Evil hasn’t won.”

  The President was sitting on the floor, his legs crossed beneath him and his eyes closed. Colonel Macklin had gotten to his feet and was beating weakly at the steel door, while Roland Croninger walked amid the computers, babbling to himself about being a King’s Knight and lovingly running his fingers over the mainframes.

  “Evil doesn’t win unless you let it,” Swan said quietly. �
��People still have a chance. They could bring things back. They could learn to live with what they have. If you let this thing happen—then evil will win.”

  He was silent, like a brooding idol. Then he said, with his eyes still closed, “It used to be ... such a beautiful world. I know. I saw it from the great dark void, and it was good. I know what it used to be. I know what it is now. Evil will perish in the final hour, child. All the world will be made clean again by the talons of Heaven.”

  “Killing everyone won’t make the world clean. It’ll just make you part of the Evil.”

  The President didn’t move or speak. Finally, his mouth opened to say something, but then it closed again, as if the thought had submerged itself.

  “Nine minutes to detonation,” the voice of a dead woman said.

  “Please stop it.” Swan knelt beside the man. Her heart was pounding, and the cold claws of panic gripped the back of her neck. But she could also feel the man with the scarlet eye watching her, and she knew she must not give him the satisfaction of seeing her break. “There are people outside who want to live. Please”—she touched the thin shoulder of his withered arm—“please give them the chance.”

  His eyes opened.

  “People can tell the difference between Good and Evil,” Swan said. “Machines can’t. Don’t let these machines make the decision, because it’s going to be the wrong one. If you can ... please stop the machines.”

  He was silent, staring at her with dead, hopeless eyes.

  “Can you?” she asked him.

  He closed his eyes. Opened them again, and stared into hers. He nodded.

  “How?”

  “Codeword,” he answered. “Codeword ... ends the prayer. But ... Evil must be destroyed. The world must be cleansed. Codeword can stop the detonation ... but I won’t speak it, because the talons of Heaven must be released. I won’t speak it. I can’t.”

  “You can. If you don’t want to be part of the Evil, you have to.”