Robin walked along the barbed wire like a caged tiger. There was only one way in or out, through a barbed wire gate the soldiers had hastily built. Off in the distance were more rapid gunshots, and Robin figured the bastards had found somebody still alive. He’d counted only six of his highwaymen inside the coop, and two of them were badly wounded. Dr. Ryan, who’d survived an attack on his makeshift hospital, had already told Robin those two were going to die. Bucky had made it, though he was sullen and would not speak. But Sister was missing, and that really twisted Robin’s guts.
He stopped and stared across the wire at a guard. The man cocked his pistol, aimed it at Robin and said, “Move on, you piece of shit.”
Robin grinned, spat on the ground and turned away. His groin crawled as he waited for the bullet to slam into his back. He’d seen prisoners shot down for no apparent reason other than to amuse the guards, and so he didn’t breathe easily again until he’d gotten far away from the man. But he walked slowly; he wasn’t going to run. He was through running.
Swan took her hands from her ears. The last of the hurting sounds were drifting away. The cornfield was a stubbled ruin, and the trucks rumbled away fat and happy as cockroaches.
She felt sick with fear, and she longed for the basement where she and Josh had been trapped such a long time ago. But she forced herself to look around at the other prisoners and to absorb the scene: the moaning and coughing of the wounded, the babbling of those who’d lost their minds, the sobbing and wailing of the death dirges. She saw their faces, their eyes dark and turned inward, all hope murdered.
They’d fought and suffered for her, and here she was sitting on the ground like an insect, waiting for a boot to smash down. Her fists clenched. Get up! she told herself. Damn it, get up! She was ashamed of her own frailty and weakness, and a spark of rage leapt within her as if thrown off by an iron wheel grinding flint. She heard two of the guards laughing. Get up! she screamed inwardly, and the rage grew, spread through her and burned the sick fear away.
“You’re a leader,” Sister had said, “and you’d better learn how to act like one.”
Swan didn’t want to be. Had never asked to be. But she heard an infant crying not too far away, and she knew that if there was to be a future for any of these people, it had to start right here… with her.
She stood up, took a deep breath to clear away the last cobwebs and walked among the other prisoners, her gaze moving left and right, meeting theirs and leaving the impression of a glimpse into a blast furnace.
“Swan!” Josh called, but she paid no attention and kept going, and he started to get up and go after her, but he saw how stiff her back was; it was a regal posture, full of confidence and courage, and now the other prisoners were sitting up as she passed them, and even the wounded were struggling to rise from the dirt. Josh let her go.
Her left leg was still stiff and aching, but at least it was unbroken. She, too, was aware of the energizing effect she was having on the others—but she did not know that around her they could have sworn they felt a radiance that briefly warmed the air.
She reached the crying infant. The child was held in the arms of a shivering man with a swollen, purple gash on the side of his head. Swan looked down at the child—and then she began to unbutton her coat of many colors and shrug out of it. She knelt down to wrap it around the man’s shoulders and enfold the infant in it.
“You!” one of the guards shouted. “Get away from there!”
Swan flinched, but she kept at what she was doing.
“Get away!” a woman prisoner urged. “They’ll kill you!”
A warning shot was fired. Swan arranged the folds of the patchwork coat to keep the child warm, and only then did she stand up.
“Go back to where you were and sit down!” the guard ordered. He was holding a rifle braced against his hip.
Swan felt everyone watching her. The moment hung.
“I won’t tell you again! Move your ass!”
God help me, she thought—and then she swallowed hard and started walking toward the barbed wire and the guard with the rifle. Immediately he lifted his weapon to a firing position.
“Halt!” another guard warned, off to the right.
Swan kept going, step after step, her eyes riveted to the man with the rifle.
He pulled the trigger.
The bullet whined past her head, and she knew it must have missed her by three inches or less. She stopped, wavered—and then took the next step.
“Swan!” Josh shouted, standing up. “Swan, don’t!”
The guard with the rifle took a backward step as Swan approached. “The next one is right between your eyes,” he promised, but the girl’s merciless stare pierced him.
Swan stopped. “These people need blankets and food,” she said, and she was surprised at the strength in her voice. “They need them now. Go tell whoever’s in charge that I want to see him.”
“Fuck you,” the guard said. He fired.
But the bullet went over Swan’s head, because one of the other guards had grabbed the rifle barrel and uptilted it. “Didn’t you hear her name, dumb ass?” the second man asked. “That’s the girl the colonel’s looking for! Go find an officer and report!”
The first guard had gone pale, realizing how close he’d come to being skinned alive. He took off at a run toward Colonel Macklin’s Command Center.
“I said,” Swan repeated firmly, “that I want to see whoever’s in charge.”
“Don’t worry,” the man told her. “You’ll get to see Colonel Macklin soon enough.”
Another truck stopped over by the chicken coop’s gate. The rear door was unbolted and opened, and fourteen more prisoners were herded into the containment area. Swan watched them come in, some of them badly wounded and hardly able to walk. She went over to help—and an electric thrill shot through her, because she’d recognized one of the new arrivals.
“Sister!” she cried out, and she ran toward the dirty woman who’d stumbled through the gate.
“Oh, dear God, dear God!” Sister sobbed as she put her arms around Swan and held her. They clung together for a moment, silent, each just needing to feel the other’s heart beating. “I thought you were dead!” Sister finally said, her vision blurred by tears. “Oh, dear God, I thought they’d killed you!”
“No, I’m all right. Josh is here, and so are Robin, Glory and Aaron. We all thought you were dead!” Swan pulled back to look at Sister. Her stomach clenched.
Burning gasoline had splattered onto the right side of Sister’s face. Her eyebrow on that side had been burned off, and her right eye was almost swollen shut. Her chin and the bridge of her nose had both been gashed by flying glass. Dirt was all over the front of her coat, and the fabric was charred and torn. Sister understood Swan’s expression, and she shrugged. “Well,” she said, “I guess I was never meant to be pretty.”
Swan hugged her again. “You’re going to be okay. I don’t know what I would’ve done without you!”
“You’d get along fine, just like you did before Paul and I showed up.” She glanced around the area. “Where is he?”
Swan knew who she meant, but she said, “Who?”
“You know who. Paul.” Sister’s voice tightened. “He is here, isn’t he?”
Swan hesitated.
“Where is he? Where’s Paul?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “He’s not here.”
“Oh… my God.” Sister clasped a dirt-caked hand to her mouth. She was dizzy, and this new blow almost finished her; she was weary and sick of fighting, and her bones ached as if her body had been snapped apart and rearranged. She’d retreated from the western wall as the soldiers overran it, had found a discarded butcher knife and killed one of them in hand-to-hand fighting, then had been forced across the field by a wave of attacking troops. She’d hidden under a shack, but when it was set afire over her head she’d had no choice but to surrender. “Paul,” she whispered. “He’s dead. I know he is.”
/> “You don’t know that! Maybe he got away! Maybe he’s still hiding!”
“Hey, you!” the guard shouted. “Break it up and move on!”
Swan said, “Lean on me,” and she started helping Sister back to where the others were. Josh was coming toward them, followed by Robin. And suddenly Swan realized that Sister no longer had the leather satchel. “The glass ring! What happened to it?”
Sister put a finger to her lips.
A Jeep roared up. Its two passengers were Roland Croninger, still wearing a helmet and with mud splattered across his bandaged face, and the man who called himself Friend. Both of them got out while the driver kept the engine idling.
Friend stalked along the wire, his brown eyes narrowed as he searched among the prisoners. And then he saw her, supporting an injured woman. “There!” he said excitedly, and he pointed. “That’s her!”
“Bring the girl out,” Roland told the nearest guard.
Friend paused, staring at the woman who leaned on Swan’s shoulder. The woman’s face was unfamiliar, and the last time he’d seen Sister she’d been disfigured. He thought he recalled seeing that woman the day he’d overheard the Junkman talking about the Army of Excellence, but he hadn’t paid any attention to her. That was back when he was sick, and details had escaped him. But now he realized that, if indeed the woman was Sister, she no longer had that damned bag with the circle of glass in ft.
“Wait!” he told the guard. “Bring that woman out, too! Hurry!”
The guard motioned for another to help him, and they entered the containment area with their rifles ready.
Josh was just about to reach out for Sister when the guards ordered Swan to halt. She looked over her shoulder at the two rifle barrels. “Come on,” one of the men said. “You wanted to see Colonel Macklin? Here’s your chance. You too, lady.”
“She’s hurt!” Josh objected. “Can’t you see—”
The guard who’d spoken fired his rifle into the ground at Josh’s feet, and Josh was forced back.
“Let’s go.” The guard prodded Swan with his rifle. “The colonel’s waiting.”
Swan supported Sister, and they were bracketed by the two guards as they were escorted to the gate.
Robin started after them, but Josh grabbed his arm. “Don’t be stupid,” Josh warned.
The boy angrily wrenched free. “You’re just going to let them take her? I thought you were supposed to be her guardian!”
“I used to be. Now she’ll have to take care of herself.”
“Right!” Robin said bitterly. “What are we going to do, just wait?”
“If you have a better suggestion—and one that won’t get a lot of people killed, including yourself and Swan—I’d just love to hear it.”
Robin had none. He watched helplessly as Swan and Sister were herded toward the Jeep where the two men waited.
As they neared the Jeep, both Swan and Sister felt their skin crawl. Sister recognized the one with the bandaged face from her confrontation with the tank—and she knew the other as well. It was in his eyes, or his smile, or the way he cocked his head or held his hands in fists at his sides. Or maybe it was the way he trembled with excitement. But she knew nun, and so did Swan.
He did not look at Swan. Instead, he strode forward and ripped the collar of Sister’s coat away from her neck.
Exposed underneath was a brown scar in the shape of a crucifix.
“Your face is different,” he said.
“So is yours.”
He nodded, and she saw a quick glint of red deep in his eyes, there and then gone like a glimpse of something monstrous and unknown. “Where is it?”
“Where is what?”
“The ring. The crown. Or whatever the fuck it is. Where?”
“Don’t you know everything? You tell me.”
He paused, and his tongue flicked across his lower lip. “You didn’t destroy it. I know that fer sure, fer sure. You hid it somewhere. Oh, you think you’re just a cutie-pie, don’t you? You think you shit roses, just like—” He almost turned his head, almost let himself look at her, but he did not. The muscles of his neck were as taut as piano wires. “Just like she does,” he finished.
“What crown?” Roland asked.
Friend ignored him. “I’ll find it,” he promised Sister. “And if I can’t persuade you to help me, my associate Captain Croninger has a wonderful way with tools. Do you forgive me now?”
Swan realized he was speaking to her, though he still stared at Sister.
“I said, do you forgive me now?” When Swan didn’t reply, his smile broadened. “I didn’t think so. Now you have a taste of what hate is. How do you like it?”
“I don’t.”
“Oh,” he said, not yet trusting himself to even glance at her, “I think you’ll learn to enjoy the flavor. Shall we go, ladies?”
They got into the Jeep, and the driver headed toward Colonel Macklin’s trailer.
Out by the broken northern wall, where flames still gnawed and trucks rumbled back and forth with their cargos of guns, clothing and shoes, a solitary figure found a group of corpses that the scavenger brigades hadn’t yet gotten to.
Alvin Mangrim rolled the body of a dead man over and examined the ears and nose. The nose was too small, he decided, but the ears would do just fine. He withdrew a bloody butcher knife from a leather holder at his waist and went to work severing both the ears; then he dropped them into a cloth bag that hung around his shoulder. The bottom of it was soggy with blood, and inside it were more ears, noses and a few fingers he’d already “liberated” from other bodies. He was planning on drying the objects out and stringing them into necklaces. He knew Colonel Macklin would like one, and he thought it might be a good way to barter some extra rations. In this day and age a man had to use his mind!
He recalled a tune from a long time ago, part of a shadowy world. He remembered holding a woman’s hand—a rough, hard and hateful hand, covered with calluses—and going to a theater to see a cartoon movie about a lovely princess who shacked up with seven dwarves. He’d always liked the tune that the dwarves whistled as they worked in the mine, and he began to whistle that song as he carved off a woman’s nose and dropped it into the bag. Most of the music he was whistling went out through the hole where his own nose had been, and it occurred to him that if he found a nose the right size he could dry it and use it to plug the hole.
He went to the next corpse, which was lying on its face. The nose would probably be smashed, Alvin thought. But he grasped the corpse’s shoulder and rolled it over anyway.
It was a man with a gray-streaked beard.
And suddenly the corpse’s eyes opened, bright blue and bloodshot against the grayish-white flesh.
“Oh… wow,” Alvin Mangrim said.
Paul lifted his Magnum, pressed the barrel against the other man’s skull and blew his brains out with the last bullet.
The dead man fell over Paul’s body and warmed him. But Paul knew he was dying, and he was glad now that he’d been too gutless to put that gun against his own head and take the easy way out. He didn’t know who the dead man was, but the bastard was history.
He waited. He’d lived most of his life alone, and he wasn’t afraid to die alone. No, not afraid at all—because the fearsome thing had been getting to this point. It was a piece of cake from here on. The only thing he regretted was not knowing what had happened to the girl—but he knew that Sister was a tough old bird, and if she’d survived all this, she wasn’t going to let any harm come to Swan.
Swan, he thought. Swan. Don’t let them break you. Spit in their eyes and kick their asses—and think sometimes of a Good Samaritan, okay?
He decided he was tired. He was going to rest, and maybe when he woke up it would be morning. It would be so wonderful to see the sun.
Paul went to sleep.
Fourteen
Prayer for the Final Hour
The master thief / Buried
treasure / A feat of magic /
/> The way out / The greatest
power / Roland’s good, long
look / Realm of God / The
machine / Swan’s death
knell / A place to rest /
The vow
Eighty-five
The master thief
Yellow lamplight fell upon the visage of Death, and in its presence Swan drew herself up tall and straight. Fear fluttered inside her ribs like a caged butterfly, but Swan met Colonel Macklin’s gaze without cringing. He was the skeletal rider, Swan realized. Yes. She knew him, knew what he was, understood the ravenous power that drove him. And now he’d scythed down Mary’s Rest, but his eyes were still hungry.
On the desk before Colonel Macklin was a piece of paper. Macklin lifted his right arm and slammed his hand down, impaling the casualty report on the nails. He pulled them loose from the scarred desktop and offered his palm to Swan.
“The Army of Excellence has lost four hundred and sixty-eight soldiers today. Probably more, when the reports are updated.” He glanced quickly at the woman who stood beside Swan, then back to the girl. Roland and two guards stood behind them, and standing at Macklin’s right was the man who called himself Friend. “Take it,” Macklin said. “Look for yourself. Tell me if you’re worth four hundred and sixty-eight soldiers.”
“The people who killed those soldiers thought so,” Sister spoke up. “And if we’d had more bullets, you’d still be outside the walls getting your butts kicked.”
Macklin’s attention drifted to her. “What’s your name?”
“She’s called Sister,” Friend said. “And she’s got something I want.”
“I thought you wanted the girl.”
“No. She’s nothing to me. But you need her. You saw the cornfield for yourself; that’s her work.” He smiled vacantly at Sister. “This woman’s hidden a pretty piece of glass that I’m going to have. Oh, yes! I’m going to find it, believe me.” His eyes probed deeply into Sister’s, down through flesh and bone to the storehouse of memory. The shadows of her experiences flew like startled birds within her mind. He saw the jagged ruins of Manhattan, and Sister’s hands uncovering the circle of glass for the first time; he saw the watery hell of the Holland Tunnel, the snow-covered highway that wound through Pennsylvania, the prowling packs of wolves and a thousand other flickering images in the space of seconds. “Where is it?” he asked her, and at once he saw the image of an uplifted pickaxe in her mind, as if silhouetted by lightning.
1987 - Swan Song v4 Page 83