His face seemed to be contorted from within by currents of pressure. For an instant Swan saw a flicker of light in the dark craters of his eyes and thought he was going to stand up, go to that keyboard and type in the codeword—but then the light died, and he was insane again. “I can’t,” he said. “Not even . .. for someone as beautiful as you.”
The computer voice said: “Eight minutes to detonation.”
Across the room, Friend waited for Swan to crack.
“The power source,” Roland said, part of his mind comprehending what was about to happen and shunting it aside, another part repeating over and over that he was a King’s Knight and that he had finally, at long last, come to the end of an arduous journey. But he was with the true King, and he was happy. “Where’s the power source for all this?”
The President stood up. “I’ll show you.” He motioned toward another door on the far side of the chamber. It was unlocked, and he led Roland through. As the door opened Swan heard the roaring sound of water, and she went through to see what lay beyond it.
A passageway led to a concrete platform with a waist-high metal railing, which stood about twenty feet over an underground river. The water rushed from a tunnel along a concrete-lined spillway, dropped off a sloping embankment and turned a large electric turbine before it streamed away through another tunnel cut into solid rock. The turbine was connected by a network of cables to two electric generators that hummed with power, and the air smelled of ozone.
“Seven minutes to detonation,” the voice echoed from the other chamber.
Roland leaned over the railing and watched the turbine going around. He could hear the crackling of power through the cables, and he knew that the underground river supplied an inexhaustible source of electricity—plenty to drive the computers, the lights and the electric fence.
“The miners found this river a long time ago,” the President said. “That’s why the complex was built here.” He cocked his head, listening to the river’s noise. “It sounds so clean, doesn’t it? I knew it was here. I remembered, after I fell from Heaven. Fear death by water.” He nodded, lost in his memories. “Yes. Fear death by water.”
Swan was about to ask him to type in the codeword again—but she saw his blank expression, and she knew it was useless. There was a movement from the corner of her eye, and the grinning monster in a human mask came through the doorway onto the platform.
“God?” Friend called, and the President turned from the railing. “There’s no other way to stop the satellites, is there? You’re the only one who could—if you wanted to. Isn’t that right?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” Friend lifted the machine gun and fired a burst of bullets, the sound deafening in the cavernlike room. The slugs marched up the President’s stomach and chest and knocked him back against the railing, where he clawed at the air and danced to the gun’s deadly rhythm. As Swan put her hands to her ears she saw the bullets slam into the man’s head and knock him off his feet. He toppled over the railing as Roland Croninger gave a scream of hysterical laughter. The machine gun choked on an empty clip, and the President hit the water and was swept into the tunnel and out of sight.
“Bang bang!” Roland shouted merrily, leaning over the blood-spattered railing. “Bang bang!”
Tears burned Swan’s eyes. He was gone, and so was the last hope of halting the prayer for the final hour.
The man with the scarlet eye tossed the useless weapon over the railing into the water and left the platform.
“Six minutes to detonation,” the voice echoed.
“Keep your head down!” Josh shouted. A bullet had just ricocheted off the tree Robin crouched behind. Josh fired across the road at the other two soldiers, but his shot went wild. The third soldier lay on the road, writhing in pain, his hands clenched around a stomach wound.
Josh could hardly see anything through the rain. A bullet had plucked at his sleeve as he dove for cover, and he thought he’d wet his pants, but he wasn’t sure because he was already so wet; he didn’t know, either, if he or Robin had shot the third soldier down. For a few seconds bullets had been whizzing past as thick as flies at a garbage men’s convention. But then he’d leaped into the woods, and Robin had followed an instant later as a ricocheting slug grazed his left hand.
The two soldiers fired repeatedly, and both Josh and Robin stayed under cover. Robin finally dared to lift his head. One of the men was running to the left to reach higher ground. He wiped rain from his eyes, took careful aim and squeezed off his last two shots. The soldier grabbed at his ribs, spun like a top and fell.
Josh shot at the remaining man, who returned the fire and then leaped to his feet, sprinting wildly along the edge of the road toward the electrified fence. “Don’t shoot!” he screamed. “Don’t shoot!” Josh aimed at his back, had a clear and killing shot—but he held his fire. He’d never shot a man in the back—not even an Army of Excellence trooper—and he was damned if he’d start now. He let the man go, and in another moment he stood up and motioned Robin on. They started up the road again.
Sister closed her eyes as the voice announced five minutes to detonation. She was dizzy, and she reached out to the wall for support, but Swan grasped her arm and held her steady.
“It’s finished,” Sister rasped. “Oh, my God ... everyone’s going to die. It’s finished.” Her knees started to buckle, and she wanted to slide down to the floor, but Swan wouldn’t let her.
“Stand up.” Still the other woman’s body sagged. “Stand up, damn it!” Swan said angrily, and she pulled her up. Sister looked blankly at her and felt the twilight haze that she’d lived in as Sister Creep beginning to close around her.
“Oh, let her fall,” the man with the scarlet eye said, standing across the chamber. “You’ll die all the same, whether you’re on your knees or your feet. Do you wonder how it’ll happen?”
Swan didn’t give him the satisfaction of answering.
“I do,” he went on. “Maybe the whole world’ll split apart and go spinning off in pieces, or maybe it’ll be as quiet as a gasp. Maybe the atmosphere’ll rip like an old sheet, and everything—mountains, forests, rivers, what’s left of cities—will be flung off like dust. Or maybe gravity’ll smash everything flat.” He crossed his arms and leaned casually against the wall. “Maybe it’ll shrivel and burn, and only a cinder will be left. Well, nobody can live forever!”
“How about you?” she had to ask. “Can you live forever?”
He laughed, softly this time. “I am forever.”
“Four minutes to detonation,” the cool voice promised.
Macklin was crouched on the floor, breathing like an animal. As the four minute mark was passed a terrible, mournful moan came from his injured throat.
“There’s your death knell, Swan,” the man with the scarlet eye said. “Do you still forgive me?”
“Why are you so afraid of me? I can’t do anything to hurt you.” He didn’t reply for a few seconds, and when he spoke his eyes were fathomless. “Hope hurts me,” he said. “It’s a disease, and you’re the germ that spreads it. We can’t have disease at my party. Oh, no. It won’t be allowed.” He was silent, staring at the floor—and then a smile skittered across his mouth as the computer voice said, “Three minutes to detonation.”
Rain smashed against the aluminum roof as Josh and Robin reached the long shedlike structure. They’d passed the Jeeps and the corpse of Brother Timothy, and now they saw the entrance to the mine shaft in the dim yellow light. Robin ran ahead up the steps and along the catwalk while Josh followed. Just before Josh got to the shaft, he heard a thunder of what sounded like baseball-sized hailstones slamming on the roof, and he thought the whole damned place was about to cave in.
But the din abruptly ceased, as if a mechanism had been switched off. It was so silent Josh could hear the shriek of the wind outside the walls.
Robin looked down the slanting mine shaft and saw the tracks. Some kind of conveyance was at the bottom. He loo
ked around and found the metal plate with the red and green buttons; he pressed the red one, but nothing happened. A touch of the green button, and at once machinery rumbled in the walls.
The long metal cable that stretched down the tracks began to reel itself up.
“Two minutes to detonation.”
Colonel James B. Macklin heard himself whimper. The walls of the pit were closing around him, and from far away he thought he heard the Shadow Soldier laughing; but no, no—he had the face of the Shadow Soldier now, and he and the Shadow Soldier were one and the same, and if anyone was laughing, it was either Roland Croninger or the monster who called himself Friend.
He clenched his left fist and beat against the sealed door—and there, in the stainless steel, he saw the skull staring back.
In that instant he clearly saw the face of his soul, and he teetered on the edge of madness. He hammered at that face, trying to smash it and make it go away, but it did not. The frozen fields where dead soldiers lay heaped and broken moved through his mind in a grisly panorama. The smoldering ruins of towns, burning vehicles and charred bodies lay before him like an offering on the altar of Hades, and he knew in that moment what the legacy of his life would be, and where it had led him. He’d escaped from the pit in Vietnam, had left his hand in the pit in Earth House, had lost his soul in the pit carved into the dirtwart land, and now would lose his life in this four-walled pit. And instead of crawling from the mud and standing on his feet after the seventeenth of July, he’d chosen to wallow in filth, to live from pit to pit, while the greatest and most hideous pit of all opened within himself and consumed him.
He knew with whom he was in league. He knew. And he knew also that he was damned, and the final pit was about to close over his head.
“Oh ... the waste ... the waste,” he whispered, and tears ran down from the staring eyes. “God forgive me ... oh, God forgive me,” he began to sob as the man who called himself Friend laughed and clapped his hands.
Someone touched Colonel Macklin’s shoulder. He lifted his head. Swan did her best not to flinch from him, because there was a tiny flicker of light deep in his eyes, just as there’d been a small flame in Sheila Fontana’s bit of glass.
For a soul-awakening instant, Macklin thought he saw the sun in her face, thought he saw all that the world could have been. Now all was lost ... all was lost....
“No,” he whispered. The pit hadn’t closed over him yet ... not yet. And he rose to his feet like a king and turned toward the mainframe computers that were about to destroy the wounded world.
He attacked the nearest machine, battering frenziedly at it with his nail-studded palm, trying to shatter the smoked glass and get at the spinning data tapes. The glass cracked, but it was reinforced with tiny threads of metal and would not let his hand through. Macklin fell to his knees and started ripping at one of the cables on the floor.
“Roland!” Friend snapped. “Stop him—now!”
Roland Croninger stepped behind Macklin and spoke one word—“Don’t!”—that went unheeded.
“Kill him!” Friend shouted, coming forward like a whirlwind before the nails in Macklin’s palm tore through the rubber cable into the wiring.
The true King had spoken. Roland was a King’s Knight, and he must follow the word of the King. He lifted his .45. His hand was shaking.
And then he fired two bullets into Colonel Macklin’s back at point-blank range.
The colonel fell onto his face. His body twitched, and then he lay still.
“Bang bang!” Roland wailed. He tried to laugh, but the sound came out strangled.
“One minute to detonation.”
94
FRIEND SMILED.
All was in hand. It had turned out to be a fine party, and now it was to be finished with a fireworks display. But the place to watch such a show was not here, in the basement seats. He saw that Sister and the little bitch were down on their knees, clinging together, because they knew it was almost finished. It was a pleasant sight, and he had nothing else to prove here.
“Fifty seconds,” the countdown continued.
He let his gaze move over Swan’s face. Too late, he thought, and he swept the weakness aside. Outside this place there would still be bands of people, more settlements to visit; the fireworks display might crack the world in an eye blink, or it might be a slow decay and consumption. He didn’t fully understand all that nuclear shit, but he was always ready to party.
In any case, she would be here, out of his way. The glass ring, or crown, or whatever it was, was lost. Sister had given him a good run, but she was on her knees now, broken. “Swan?” he said. “Do you forgive me?”
She didn’t know what she was going to say until she said it, but as she opened her mouth he put his finger to his lips and whispered, “Too late.”
His already-charred uniform had begun to smoke. His face had started melting.
“Forty seconds,” the computer’s voice said.
The flame that was consuming the man with the scarlet eye was a cold burning. Both Sister and Swan shrank away, but Roland stood awed, his teeth chattering and his eyes gleaming behind the goggles.
False flesh sizzled away and laid open what was beneath the mask—but Swan averted her eyes at the last second, and Sister cried out and shielded her face.
Roland watched and saw a face that no human being had ever witnessed and lived to tell about.
It was a suppurating sore with reptilian eyes, a seething and diseased mass that pulsed and rippled with volcanic fury. It was a maddening glimpse into the end of time, at worlds afire and the universe in chaos, black holes yawning in the fabric of time and civilizations scorched to ashes.
Roland fell to his knees at the feet of the true King. He lifted his hands toward the cold flame and begged, “Take me with you!”
What might have been a mouth opened in that nightmarish, apocalyptic face, and the ancient voice answered, “I’ve always walked alone.”
Freezing fire leaped out of the uniform and sizzled over Roland’s head like a bolt of electricity. It slammed upward through a small air vent in the wall, leaving a hole in the metal grille that was at the same time burned and rimmed with dirty ice.
The empty Army of Excellence uniform, still molded in the shape of a man, collapsed to the floor, ice crackling in its folds.
“Thirty seconds,” the seductive voice intoned.
Sister saw her chance and knew what she must do. She shrugged off the shock and lunged toward Roland Croninger.
Her fingers gripped the wrist of his gun hand. He looked up at her, now totally insane. She shouted, “Swan! Stop the machine!” and tried to wrench the gun loose, but his other fist struck her in the face. She hung onto his wrist with all her strength, and the young knight of an infernal king fought her in a maniacal frenzy, getting his arm around her throat and squeezing.
Swan started to help Sister, but Sister was buying them precious seconds, and she must do what she could to stop the countdown. She bent to the floor and tried to rip up one of the cables.
Roland released Sister’s throat and slammed his fist into her mouth. His teeth snapped at her cheek, but she warded him off with an elbow and hung on. The gun fired, its bullet whining off the opposite wall. They fought for the weapon, and then Sister rammed her elbow into his chest and leaned forward, sinking her teeth into his thin wrist. He howled in pain; his fingers opened, and the gun fell to the floor. Sister reached for it, but Roland’s hand gripped her face, and his fingernails dug toward her eyes.
Swan couldn’t get the cable loose; it was sealed to the floor, and the rubber was too thick to tear through. She looked up at the black keyboard on the table at the room’s center and remembered what the old man had said about a codeword. But whatever it was had died with him. Still, she had to try. She jumped over the fighting figures and reached the keyboard.
“Twenty seconds.”
Roland clawed at Sister’s face, but she twisted her head away, and her fingers close
d on the butt of the gun. As she picked it up a fist hammered across the back of her neck, and she lost her grip.
Trying to clear her mind, Swan stood over the keyboard. She typed, Stop.
Roland broke free from Sister and scrambled after the gun. He got it and twisted to fire at Sister, but she was on him like a wildcat, grabbing his wrist again and pounding at his misshapen, bleeding face.
“Fifteen seconds,” the countdown continued.
End, Swan typed, all her concentration on the letters.
Sister reared her arm back and smashed her fist into Roland’s face. One of the goggles’ lenses shattered, and he yelped with pain. But then he struck her a glancing blow on the temple, stunning her, and he flung her aside like a sack of straw.
“Ten seconds.”
Oh, God, help me! Swan thought as panic shot through her, and she clenched her teeth to hold back a scream.
She typed, Finish.
“Nine ...”
She would have only one more chance now. She couldn’t waste it.
The prayer for the final hour, she thought. The prayer.
“Eight ...”
The prayer.
Sister grabbed at Roland’s arm again, still fighting for the gun. He jerked free, and she saw his hideous face grin as he squeezed the trigger. Once ... twice ...
The bullets pierced Sister’s ribs and shattered her collarbone, and she was flung back to the floor as if she’d been kicked. Blood was in her mouth.
“Seven ...”
Swan had heard the shots, but the answer was close, and she dared not turn her attention from the keyboard. What ended a prayer? What ended—
“Get away!” Roland Croninger roared, rising from the floor with blood running from his mouth and nostrils.
“Six ...”
He aimed at Swan, started to pull the trigger.
Something pounded like judgment on the other side of the steel door, and Roland was distracted for a vital split second.
And suddenly Colonel Macklin rose, and with his last surge of life and strength he slammed the nail-studded right hand into Roland Croninger’s heart. As Roland was struck the gun went off, and the bullet whistled inches over Swan’s head.
Swan Song Page 90