1987 - Swan Song v4

by Robert McCammon

  Forty-nine

  Flee the mark of Cain

  Darkness fell over the snow-covered buildings and houses of what had been Broken Bow, Nebraska. Barbed wire surrounded the town, and here and there bits of timber and rags burned in empty oil cans, the wind sending orange sparks spiraling into the sky. On the curving northwest arc of Highway 2, dozens of corpses lay frozen where they’d fallen, and the hulks of charred vehicles still spat flame.

  In the fortress that Broken Bow had been for the last two days, three hundred and seventeen sick and injured men, women and children were trying desperately to keep warm around a huge central bonfire. The houses of Broken Bow were being torn apart and fed to the flames. Another two hundred and sixty-four men and women armed with rifles, pistols, axes, hammers and knives crouched in trenches hastily hacked in the earth along the barbed wire at the western rim of town. Their faces were turned westward, into the shrilling subzero wind that had killed so many. They shivered in their ragged coats, and tonight they dreaded a different kind of death.

  “There!” a man with an ice-crusted bandage around his head shouted. He pointed into the distance. “There! They’re coming!”

  A chorus of shouts and warnings moved along the trench. Rifles and pistols were quickly checked. The trench vibrated with nervous motion, and the breath of human beings whirled through the air tike diamond dust.

  They saw the headlights weaving slowly through the carnage on the highway. Then the music drifted to them on the stinging wind. It was carnival music, and as the headlights grew nearer a skinny, hollow-eyed man in a heavy sheepskin coat stood up at the center of the trench and trained a pair of binoculars at the oncoming vehicle. His face was streaked with dark brown keloids.

  He put the binoculars down before the cold could seal the eyecups to his face. “Hold your fire!” he shouted to the left. “Pass it down!” The message began to go down the line. He looked to the right and shouted the same order, and then he waited, one gloved hand on the Ingram machine gun under his coat.

  The vehicle passed a burning car, and the red glare revealed it to be a truck with the remnants of paint on its sides advertising different flavors of ice cream. Two loudspeakers were mounted atop the truck’s cab, and the windshield had been replaced with a metal plate that had two narrow slits cut for the driver and passengers to see through. The front fender and radiator grille were shielded with metal, and from the armor protruded jagged metal spikes about two feet long. The glass of both headlights was reinforced with heavy tape and covered with wire mesh. On both sides of the truck were gunslits, and atop the truck was a crude sheet-metal turret and the snout of a heavy machine gun.

  The armored Good Humor truck, its modified engine snorting, rolled with chain-covered tires over the carcass of a horse and stopped about fifty yards from the barbed wire. The merry, tape-recorded calliope music continued for perhaps another two minutes—and then there was silence.

  The silence stretched. A man’s voice came through the loudspeakers: “Franklin Hayes! Are you listening, Franklin Hayes?”

  The skinny, weary man in the sheepskin coat narrowed his eyes but said nothing.

  “Franklin Hayes!” the voice continued, with a mocking, lilting note. “You’ve given us a good fight, Franklin Hayes! The Army of Excellence salutes you!”

  “Fuck you,” a middle-aged, shivering woman said softly in the trench beside Hayes. She had a knife at her belt and a pistol in her hand, and a green keloid covered most of her face in the shape of a lily pad.

  “You’re a fine commander, Franklin Hayes! We didn’t think you had the strength to get away from us at Dunning. We thought you’d die on the highway. How many of you are left, Franklin Hayes? Four hundred? Five hundred? And how many are able to keep fighting? Maybe half that number? The Army of Excellence has over four thousand healthy soldiers, Franklin Hayes! Some of those used to suffer for you, but they decided to save their lives and cross over to our side!”

  Someone in the trench to the left fired a rifle, and several other shots followed. Hayes shouted, “Don’t waste your bullets, damn it!” The firing dwindled, then ceased.

  “Your soldiers are nervous, Franklin Hayes!” the voice taunted. “They know they’re about to die.”

  “We’re not soldiers,” Hayes whispered to himself. “You crazy fucker, we’re not soldiers!” How his community of survivors—once numbering over a thousand people trying to rebuild the town of Scottsbluff—had gotten embroiled in this insane “war” he didn’t know. A van driven by a husky red-bearded man had come into Scottsbluff, and out had stepped another, frail-figured man with bandages wrapping his face—all except his eyes, which were covered with goggles. The bandaged man had spoken in a high, young voice, had said that he’d been badly burned a long time ago; he’d asked for water and a place to spend the night, but he wouldn’t let Dr. Gardner even touch his bandages. Hayes himself, as mayor of Scottsbluff, had taken the young man on a walking tour of the structures they were rebuilding. Sometime during the night the two men had driven away, and three days later Scottsbluff was attacked and burned to the ground. The screams of his wife and son still reverberated in Hayes’s mind. Then Hayes had started leading the survivors east to escape the maniacs that pursued them—but the “Army of Excellence” had more trucks, cars, horses, trailers and gasoline, more weapons and bullets and “soldiers,” and the group that followed Hayes had left hundreds of corpses in its wake.

  This was an insane nightmare with no end, Hayes realized. Once he’d been an eminent professor of economics at the University of Wyoming, and now he felt like a trapped rat.

  The headlights of the armored Good Humor truck burned like two malevolent eyes. “The Army of Excellence invites all able-bodied men, women and children who don’t want to suffer anymore to join us,” the amplified voice said. “Just cross the wire and keep walking west, and you’ll be well taken care of—hot food, a warm bed, shelter and protection. Bring your weapons and ammunition with you, but keep the barrels of your guns pointed to the ground. If you are healthy and sound of mind, and if you are unblemished by the mark of Cain, we invite you with love and open arms. You have five minutes to decide.”

  The mark of Cain, Hayes thought grimly. He’d heard that phrase through those damned speakers before, and he knew they meant either the keloids or the growths that covered the faces of many people. They only wanted those “unblemished” and “sound of mind.” But he wondered about the young man with the eye goggles and the bandaged face. Why had he been wearing those bandages, if he himself had not been “blemished” by the “mark of Cain”?

  Whoever was guiding that mob of ravagers and rapists was beyond all humanity. Somehow he—or she—had drilled bloodlust into the brains of over four thousand followers, and now they were killing, looting and burning struggling communities for the sheer thrill of it.

  There was a shout to the right. Two men were struggling over the barbed wire; they got across, snagging their coats and trousers but pulling free, and started running west with their rifles pointed to the ground. “Cowards!” someone shouted. “You dirty cowards!” But the two men did not look back.

  A woman went across, followed by another man. Then a man, a woman and a young boy escaped the trench and fled to the west, all carrying guns and ammunition. Angry shouts and curses were flung at their backs, but Hayes didn’t blame them. None of them bore keloids; why should they stay and be slaughtered?

  “Come home,” the voice intoned over the loudspeakers, like the silken drone of a revival preacher. “Come home to love and open arms. Flee the mark of Cain, and come home… come home… come home.”

  More people were going over the wire. They vanished westward into the darkness.

  “Don’t suffer with the unclean! Come home, flee the mark of Cain!”

  A gunshot rang out, and one of the truck’s headlights shattered, but the mesh deflected the slug and the light continued to burn. Still, people climbed over the fence and scurried west.

 
; “I ain’t goin’ nowhere,” the woman with the lily pad keloid told Hayes. “I’m set and stayin’.”

  The last to go was a teenage boy with a shotgun, his overcoat pockets stuffed with shells.

  “It’s time, Franklin Hayes!” the voice called.

  He took out the Ingram gun and pushed the safety off.

  “It’s time!” the voice roared—and the roar was joined by other roars, rising together, mixing and mingling like a single, inhuman battle cry. But they were the roars of engines firing, popping and sputtering, blasting to full-throated life. And then the headlights came on—dozens of headlights, hundreds of headlights that curved in an arc on both sides of Highway 2, facing the trench. Hayes realized with numb terror that the other armored trucks, tractor-trailer rigs, and monster machines had been silently pushed almost to the barbed-wire barrier while the Good Humor truck had kept their attention. The headlights speared into the faces of those in the trenches as engines were gunned and chained tires crunched forward across snow and frozen bodies.

  Hayes stood up to yell “Fire!” but the shooting had already started. Sparks of gunfire rippled up and down the trench; bullets whined off metal tire guards, radiator shields and iron turrets. Still the battle wagons came on, almost leisurely, and the Army of Excellence held their fire. Then Hayes screamed, “Use the bombs!” but he was not heard over the tumult. The trench fighters didn’t have to be told to crouch down, pick up one of the three gasoline-filled bottles they’d all been supplied with, touch the rag wicks to the flames from oil barrels and throw the homemade bombs.

  The bottles exploded, sending flaming gasoline shooting across the snow, but in the leaping red light the monsters came on, unscathed, and now some of them were rolling over the barbed wire less than twenty feet from the trench. One bottle scored a direct hit on the viewslit of a Pinto’s armored windshield; it shattered and sprayed fiery gas. The driver tumbled out screaming, his face aflame. He staggered toward the wire, and Franklin Hayes shot him dead with the Ingram gun. The Pinto kept going, tore through the barricade and crushed four people before they could scramble from the trench.

  The vehicles tore the barbed-wire barricade to shreds, and suddenly their crude turrets and gunports erupted with rifle, pistol and machine-gun fire that swept across the trench as Hayes’s followers tried to run. Dozens slithered back in or lay motionless in the dirty, blood-streaked snow. One of the burning oil cans went over, touching off unused bombs that began exploding in the trench. Everywhere was fire and streaking bullets, writhing bodies, screams and a blur of confusion. “Move back!” Franklin Hayes yelled. The defenders fled toward the second barrier about fifty yards behind—a five-foot-high wall of bricks, timbers and frozen bodies of their friends and families stacked up like cordwood.

  Franklin Hayes saw soldiers on foot, fast approaching behind the first wave of vehicles. The trench was wide enough to catch any car or truck that tried to pass, but the Army of Excellence’s infantry would soon swarm across—and through the smoke and blowing snow there seemed to be thousands. He heard their war cry—a low, animalish moan that almost shook the earth.

  Then the armored radiator of a truck was staring him in the face, and he scrambled out of the trench as the vehicle stopped two feet short. A bullet whined past his head, and he stumbled over the body of the woman with the lily pad keloid. Then he was up and running, and bullets thunked into the snow all around him, and he clambered up over the wall of bricks and bodies and turned again to face the attackers.

  Explosions started blasting the wall apart, metal shrapnel flying. Hayes realized they were using hand grenades—something they’d saved until now—and he kept firing at running figures until the Ingram gun blistered his hands.

  “They’ve broken through on the right!” somebody shouted. “They’re comin’ in!”

  Swarms of men were running in all directions. Hayes fumbled in his pocket, found another clip and reloaded. One of the enemy soldiers leapt over the wall, and Hayes had time to see that his face was daubed with what looked like Indian warpaint before the man spun and drove a knife into the side of a woman fighting a few feet away. Hayes shot him through the head, kept shooting as the soldier jerked and fell.

  “Run! Get back!” somebody yelled. Other voices, other screams pierced the wail of noise: “We can’t hold ’em! They’re breakin’ through!”

  A man with blood streaming down his face grasped Hayes’s arm. “Mr. Hayes!” he shouted. “They’re breaking through! We can’t hold them back any—”

  He was interrupted by the blade of an axe sinking into his skull.

  Hayes staggered back. The Ingram gun dropped from his hands, and he sank down to his knees.

  The axe was pulled loose, and the corpse fell to the snow.

  “Franklin Hayes?” a soft, almost gentle voice asked.

  He saw a long-haired figure standing over him, couldn’t make out the face. He was tired, all used up. “Yes,” he replied.

  “Time to go to sleep,” the man said, and he lifted his axe.

  When it fell, a dwarf who had crouched atop the broken wall jumped up and clapped his hands.

  Fifty

  The good deed done

  A battered Jeep with one good headlight emerged from the snow on Missouri Highway 63 and entered what had once been a town. Lanterns glowed within a few of the clapboard houses, but otherwise darkness ruled the streets.

  “Stop there.” Sister motioned toward a brick structure on the right. The building’s windows were boarded up, but crowded around it in the gravel parking lot were several old cars and pickup trucks. As Paul Thorson guided the Jeep into the lot the single headlight washed over a sign painted in red on one of the boarded windows: Bucket of Blood Tavern.

  “Uh… you sure you want to stop at this particular place?” Paul inquired.

  She nodded, her head cowled by the hood of a dark blue parka. “Where there’re cars, somebody ought to know where to find gas.” She glanced at the fuel gauge. The needle hovered near Empty. “Maybe we can find out where the hell we are, too.”

  Paul turned off the heater, then the single headlight and the engine. He was wearing his old reliable leather jacket over a red woolen sweater, with a scarf around his neck and a brown woolen cap pulled over his skull. His beard was ashen-gray, as was much of his hair, but his eyes were still a powerful, undimmed electric blue against the heavily lined, windburned skin of his face. He glanced uneasily at the sign on the boards and climbed out of the Jeep. Sister reached into the rear compartment, where an assortment of canvas bags, cardboard boxes and crates were secured with a chain and padlock. Right behind her seat was a beat-up brown leather satchel, which she picked up with one gloved hand and took with her.

  From beyond the door came the noise of off-key piano music and a burst of raucous male laughter. Paul braced himself and pushed it open, walking in with Sister at his heels. The door, fixed to the wall with tight springs, snapped shut behind them.

  Instantly, the music and laughter ceased. Suspicious eyes glared at the new arrivals.

  At the room’s center, next to a freestanding cast-iron stove, six men had been playing cards around a table. A haze of yellow smoke from hand-rolled cigarettes hung in the air, diffusing the light of several lanterns that dangled from wall hooks. Other tables were occupied by two or three men and some rough-looking women. A bartender in a fringed leather jacket stood behind a long bar that Paul noted was pocked with bullet holes. Blazing logs popped red sparks from a fireplace in the rear wall, and at the piano sat a chunky young woman with long black hair and a violet keloid that covered the lower half of her face and exposed throat.

  Both Sister and Paul had seen that most of the men wore guns in holsters at their waists and had rifles propped against their chairs.

  The floor was an inch deep in sawdust, and the tavern smelled of unwashed bodies. There was a sharp ping! as one of the men at the center table spat tobacco juice into a pail.

  “We’re lost,” Paul said.
“What town is this?”

  A man laughed. He had greasy black hair and was wearing what looked like a dogskin coat. He blew smoke into the air from a brown cigarette. “What town you tryin’ to get to, fella?”

  “We’re just traveling. Is this place on the map?”

  The men exchanged amused glances, and now the laughter spread. “What map do you mean?” the one with greasy hair asked. “Drawn up before the seventeenth of July, or after?”

  “Before.”

  “The before maps ain’t no fuckin’ good,” another man said. He had a bony face and was shaved almost bald. Four fishhooks dangled from his left earlobe, and he wore a leather vest over a red-checked shirt. At his skinny waist were a holster and pistol. “Everything’s changed. Towns are graveyards. Rivers flooded over, changed course and froze. Lakes dried up. What was woods is desert. So the before maps ain’t no fuckin’ good.”

  Paul was aware of all that. After seven years of traveling a zigzag path across a dozen states, there was very little that shocked him or Sister anymore. “Did this town ever have a name?”

  “Moberly,” the bartender offered. “Moberly, Missouri. Used to be about fifteen thousand people here. Now I guess we’re down to three or four hundred.”

  “Yeah, but it ain’t the nukes that killed ’em!” a wizened woman with red hair and red lips spoke up from another table. “It’s the rotgut shit you serve in here, Derwin!” She cackled and raised a mug of oily-looking liquid to her lips while the others laughed and hooted.

  “Aw, fuck you, Lizzie!” Derwin shot back. “Your gut’s been pickled since you was ten years old!”

  Sister walked to an empty table and set her satchel atop it. Beneath the hood of her parka, most of her face was covered by a dark gray scarf. Unsnapping the satchel, she removed the tattered, folded and refolded Rand McNally road atlas, which she smoothed out and opened to the map of Missouri. In the dim light, she found the thin red line of Highway 63 and followed it to a dot named Moberly, about seventy-five miles north of what had been Jefferson City. “Here we are,” she told Paul, who came over to look.