1987 - Swan Song v4

by Robert McCammon

  They had turned away in silence. Sister Creep had led Artie southward, toward the Holland Tunnel and another route under the river. Darkness had fallen before they’d made it, and now they’d have to wait until morning to find out if the Holland had collapsed as well. The last street sign that Sister Creep had found said West 22nd, but it was lying on its side in the ashes and could’ve blown far from where that street had actually been.

  “Well,” Artie said quietly, staring across the river, “don’t look like anybody’s home, does it?”

  “No.” Sister Creep shivered and drew the mink coat tighter around her. “It’s gotten colder. We’re going to have to find some shelter.” She looked through the darkness at the vague shapes of the few structures that hadn’t been toppled. Any one of them might fall on their heads, but Sister Creep didn’t like the way the temperature was dropping. “Come on,” she said, and she started walking toward one of the buildings. Artie followed her without question.

  During their journey they had found only four other people who hadn’t been killed in the detonation, and three of those had been so mangled they were very near death. The fourth was a terribly burned man in a pin-striped business suit who had howled like a dog when they’d approached and had scuttled back into a crevice to hide. So Sister Creep and Artie had gone on, walking over so many bodies that the horror of death lost its impact; now they were shocked whenever they heard a groan in the rubble or, as had happened once, someone laughing and shrieking off in the distance. They had gone in the direction of the voice, but they’d seen no one living. The mad laughter haunted Sister Creep; it reminded her of the laughter she’d heard inside that theater, from the man with the burning hand.

  “There are others still alive out there,” he’d said. “Waiting to die. It won’t be long. Not long for you, either.”

  “We’ll see about that, fucker,” Sister Creep said.

  “What?” Artie asked.

  “Oh. Nothing. I was just… thinking.” Thinking, she realized. Thinking was not something she did much of. The last several years were blurred, and beyond those was a darkness broken only by the flashing blue light and the demon in the yellow raincoat. My real name’s not Sister Creep! she thought suddenly. My real name is… but she didn’t know what it was, and she didn’t know who she was or where she’d come from. How did I get here? she asked herself, but she could provide no answer.

  They entered the remains of a gray stone building by climbing up a rubble heap and crawling through a hole in the wall. The interior was pitch dark and the air was dank and smoky, but at least they were within a windbreak. They groped their way along a tilting floor until they found a corner. When they’d gotten settled, Sister Creep reached into her bag to bring out the loaf of bread and the bottle of ginger ale. Her fingers grazed the circle of glass, which she’d wrapped up in a scorched striped shirt she’d taken off a mannequin. The other pieces of glass, wrapped in the blue scarf, were down at the bottom of the bag.

  “Here.” She tore off a piece of the bread and gave it to Artie, then tore a piece for herself. There was only a burned taste, but it was better than nothing. She unscrewed the cap off the bottle of ginger ale, and the soda instantly foamed up and spewed everywhere. She quickly put it to her mouth, drank several swallows and passed the bottle to Artie.

  “I hate ginger ale,” Artie said after he’d finished drinking, “but this is the best damned stuff I ever drank in my life.”

  “Don’t drink it all.” She decided against opening the anchovies, because their saltiness would only make them more thirsty. The slices of ham were too precious to eat yet. She gave him another small bit of bread, took another for herself and put the loaf away.

  “Know what I had for dinner the night before it happened?” Artie asked her. “A steak. A big T-bone steak at a place on East Fiftieth. Then some of the guys and me started hittin’ the bars. That was a night, I’ll tell you! We had a helluva time!”

  “Good for you.”

  “Yeah. What were you doin’ that night?”

  “Nothing special,” she said. “I was just around.”

  Artie was quiet for awhile, chewing on his bread. Then he said, “I called my wife before I left the hotel. I guess I told her a whopper, ’cause I said I was just gonna go out and have a nice dinner and come back to bed. She said for me to be careful, and she said she loved me. I told her I loved her, and that I’d see her in a couple of days.” He was silent, and when he sighed Sister Creep heard his breath hitch. “Jesus,” he whispered. “I’m glad I called her. I’m glad I got to hear her voice before it happened. Hey, lady—what if Detroit got hit, too?”

  “Got hit? What do you mean, got hit?”

  “A nuclear bomb,” he said. “What else do you think could’ve done this? A nuclear bomb! Maybe more than one. The things probably fell all over the country! Probably hit all the cities, and Detroit, too!” His voice was getting hysterical, and he forced himself to wait until he was under control again. “Damned Russians bombed us, lady. Don’t you read the papers?”

  “No. I don’t.”

  “What’ve you been doin’? Livin’ on Mars? Anybody who reads the papers and watches the tube could’ve seen this shit comin’! The Russians bombed the hell out of us… and I guess we bombed the hell out of them, too.”

  A nuclear bomb? she thought. She hardly remembered what that was; nuclear war was something she’d worried about in another life.

  “I hope—if they got Detroit—that she went fast. I mean, that’s okay to hope for, isn’t it? That she went fast, without pain?”

  “Yes. I think that’s all right.”

  “Is it… is it okay that I told her a lie? It was a white lie. I didn’t want her to be worried about me. She worries that I’m gonna drink too much and make a fool of myself. I can’t hold my liquor too good. Is it okay that I told her a white lie that night?”

  She knew he was begging her to say it was all right. “Sure,” she told him. “A lot of people did worse things that night. She went to sleep without worrying, didn’t—”

  Something sharp pricked Sister Creep’s left cheek. “Don’t move,” a woman’s voice warned. “Don’t even breathe.” The voice shook; whoever was speaking was scared to death.

  “Who’s there?” Artie asked, startled almost out of his skin. “Hey, lady! You okay?”

  “I’m okay,” Sister Creep answered. She reached up to her cheek and felt a jagged, knifelike piece of glass.

  “I said don’t move!” The glass jabbed her. “How many are with you?”

  “Just one more.”

  “Artie Wisco. My name’s Artie Wisco. Where are you?”

  There was a long pause. Then the woman said, “You’ve got food?”

  “Yes.”

  “Water.” It was a man’s voice this time, further to the left. “Have you got water?”

  “Not water. Ginger ale.”

  “Let’s see what they look like, Beth,” the man said.

  A lighter’s flame popped up, so bright in the darkness that Sister Creep had to close her eyes against the glare for a few seconds. The woman held the flame closer to Sister Creep’s face, then toward Artie. “I think they’re all right,” she told the man, who moved into the range of the light.

  Sister Creep could make out the woman crouched next to her. Her face was swollen and there was a gash across the bridge of her nose, but she appeared to be young, maybe in her mid-twenties, with a few remaining ringlets of curly light brown hair dangling from her blistered scalp. Her eyebrows had been burned off, and her dark blue eyes were puffy and bloodshot; she was a slim woman, and she wore a blue striped dress that was splotched with blood. Her long, frail arms seethed with blisters. Draped around her shoulders was what looked like part of a gold-colored curtain.

  The man wore the rags of a cop’s uniform. He was older, possibly in his late thirties, and most of his dark, crewcut hair remained on the right side of his head; on the left, it had been burned away to raw scalp. He wa
s a big, heavyset man, and his left arm was wrapped up and supported in a sling made of that same coarse gold material.

  “My God,” Artie said. “Lady, we found a cop!”

  “Where’d you two come from?” Beth asked her.

  “Out there. Where else?”

  “What’s in the bag?” The woman nodded toward it.

  “Are you asking me or mugging me?”

  She hesitated, glanced at the policeman and then back at Sister Creep, and lowered the piece of glass. She stuck it through a sash tied around her waist. “I’m asking you.”

  “Burned bread, a couple of cans of anchovies, and some ham slices.” Sister Creep could almost see the young woman start salivating. She reached in and brought out the bread. “Here. Eat it in good health.”

  Beth tore off a chunk and handed the dwindling loaf to the policeman, who also gouged off some and stuffed it into his mouth as if it were God’s manna. “Please,” Beth said, and she reached for the ginger ale. Sister Creep obliged her, and by the time she and the policeman had both had a taste there were maybe three good swallows left. “All the water’s contaminated,” Beth told her. “One of us drank some from a puddle yesterday. He started throwing up blood last night. It took him almost six hours to die. I’ve got a watch that still works. See?” She proudly showed Sister Creep her Timex; the crystal was gone, but that old watch was still ticking. The time was twenty-two minutes past eight.

  “One of us,” she’d said. “How many more people are here?” Sister Creep asked.

  “Two more. Well, really one. The Spanish woman. We lost Mr. Kaplan last night—he drank the water. The boy died yesterday, too. And Mrs. Ivers died in her sleep. There are four of us left.”

  “Three,” the policeman said.

  “Yeah. Right. Three of us left. The Spanish woman’s down in the basement. We can’t get her to move, and neither of us understand Spanish. Do you?”

  “No. Sorry.”

  “I’m Beth Phelps, and he’s Jack…” She couldn’t remember his last name and shook her head.

  “Jack Tomachek,” he supplied.

  Artie reintroduced himself, but Sister Creep said, “Why aren’t you people up here instead of in the basement?”

  “It’s warmer down there,” Jack told her. “And safer, too.”

  “Safer? How’s that? If this old building shifts again, it’ll come down on your heads.”

  “We were up here yesterday,” Beth explained. “The boy—he was about fifteen, I guess—was the strongest of us. He was Ethiopian or something, and he could only speak a little English. He went out to find food, and he brought back some cans of corned beef hash, cat food, and a bottle of wine. But… they followed him back here. They found us.”

  “They?” Artie asked. “They who?”

  “Three of them. Burned so bad you couldn’t tell if they were men or women. They followed him back here, and they were carrying hammers and broken bottles. One of them had an axe. They wanted our food. The boy fought them, and the one with the axe…” She trailed off, her eyes glassy and staring at the orange flame of the lighter in her hand. “They were crazy,” she said. “They… they weren’t human. One of them cut me across the face. I guess I was lucky. We ran from them and they took our food. I don’t know where they went. But I remember… they smelled like… like burned cheeseburgers. Isn’t that funny? That’s what I thought of—burned cheeseburgers. So we went down into the basement to hide. There’s no telling what other kinds of… of things are out there.”

  You don’t know the half of it, Sister Creep thought.

  “I tried to fight them off,” Jack said. “But I guess I’m not in fighting shape anymore.” He turned around, and both Sister Creep and Artie flinched. Jack Tomachek’s back from shoulders to waist was a scarlet, suppurating mass of burned tissue. He turned to face them again. “Worst fucking sunburn this old Polack ever got.” He smiled bitterly.

  “We heard you up here,” Beth told them. “At first we thought those things had come back. We came up to listen, and we heard you eating. Listen… the Spanish woman hasn’t eaten, either. Can I take her some bread?”

  “Take us to the basement.” Sister Creep got to her feet. “I’ll open up the ham.”

  Beth and Jack led them into a hallway. Water was streaming down from above, forming a large black pool on the floor. Through the hallway, a flight of wooden stairs without a bannister descended into the darkness. The staircase shook precariously under their feet.

  It did seem warmer, if only by five or six degrees, in the basement, though exhaled breath was still visible. The stone walls were still holding together, and the ceiling was mostly intact but for a few holes that let rainwater seep through. This was an old building, Sister Creep thought, and they didn’t put them up like this anymore. Stone pillars set at intervals supported the ceiling; some of those were riddled with cracks, but none of them had collapsed. Yet, Sister Creep told herself.

  “There she is.” Beth walked toward a figure huddled at the base of one of the pillars. Black water was streaming down right over the figure’s head; she was sitting in a spreading pool of contaminated rain, and she was holding something in her arms. Beth’s lighter went out. “Sorry,” she said. “It gets too hot to hold, and I don’t want to use up all the fluid. It was Mr. Kaplan’s.”

  “What did you do with the bodies?”

  “We took them away. This place is full of corridors. We took them way down to the end of one and left them. I… I wanted to say a prayer over them, but…”

  “But what?”

  “I forgot how to pray,” she replied. “Praying… just didn’t seem to make much sense anymore.”

  Sister Creep grunted and reached into her bag for the package of ham slices. Beth bent down and offered the bottle of ginger ale to the Spanish woman. Rainwater splattered her hand. “Here,” she said. “It’s something to drink. El drink-o.”

  The Spanish woman made a whimpering, crooning sound but didn’t respond.

  “She won’t move away from there,” Beth said. “The water’s getting all over her, and she won’t move six feet to a dry place. Do you want food?” she asked the Spanish woman. “Eat eat? Christ, how can you live in New York City without knowing English?”

  Sister Creep got most of the plastic peeled away from the ham. She tore off a piece and bent on her knees beside Beth Phelps. “Use your lighter again. Maybe if she sees what we’ve got, we can pull her away from there.”

  The lighter flared. Sister Creep looked into the blistered but still pretty face of a Hispanic girl who was maybe all of twenty. Her long black hair was crisped on the ends, and there were raw holes here and there on her scalp where circles of hair had been burned away. The woman paid no attention to the light. Her large, liquid brown eyes were fixed on what she cuddled in her arms.

  “Oh,” Sister Creep said softly. “Oh… no.”

  The child was maybe three years old—a girl, with glossy black hair like her mother’s. Sister Creep couldn’t see the child’s face. She didn’t want to. But one small hand was rigidly curled as if reaching up for her mother, and the stiffness of the corpse in the woman’s arms told Sister Creep that the child had been dead for some time.

  The water was leaking down through a hole in the ceiling, running through the Spanish woman’s hair and over her face like black tears. She began to croon gently, lovingly rocking the corpse.

  “She’s out of her mind,” Beth said. “She’s been like that since the child died last night. If she doesn’t get out of that water, she’s going to die, too.”

  Sister Creep heard Beth only vaguely, as if from a vast distance. She held out her arms toward the Spanish woman. “Here,” she said, in what sounded like a stranger’s voice. “I’ll take her. Give her to me.” Rainwater ran down her hands and arms in streaks of ebony.

  The Spanish woman’s crooning got louder.

  “Give her to me. I’ll take her.”

  The Spanish woman began to rock the corpse more furi
ously.

  “Give her to me.” Sister Creep heard her own voice echo crazily, and suddenly there was a flashing blue light in her eyes. “I’ll… take… her. .. .”

  The rain was falling, and thunder rumbled like the voice of God, You! You sinner! You drunken sinner, you’ve killed her, and now you have to pay…

  She looked down. In her arms was the corpse of a little girl. There was blood in the child’s blond hair, and the little girl’s eyes were open and full of rain. The blue light of the state trooper car was spinning, and the trooper in the yellow raincoat who was crouched on the road in front of her said gently, “Come on. You have to give her to me now.” He looked back over his shoulder, at the other trooper who was setting out flares near the wreckage of an overturned car. “She’s out of her mind. I can smell alcohol, too. You’re going to have to help me.”

  And then they were both reaching toward her, both of the demons in yellow raincoats, trying to take her baby. She recoiled and fought them, screaming, “No! You can’t have her! I won’t let you have her!” But the thunder commanded, Give her up, you sinner, give her up, and when she cried out and put her hands over her ears to block off the voice of judgment they took her baby away from her.

  And from the little girl’s hand fell a globe of glass, the kind of trinket that holds a little snow scene within it, a make-believe village in a fairy-tale land.

  “Mommy,” she remembered the child saying excitedly, “look what I won at the party! I pinned the tail on the donkey the best!”

  The child had shaken the globe, and for a moment—just a moment—her mother had looked away from the road to focus her blurred vision on the scene of snow falling amid the roofs of a distant and perfect land.

  She watched the glass globe fall, in terrible slow motion, and she screamed because she knew it was about to break on the concrete, and when it broke everything would be gone and destroyed.