1987 - Swan Song v4

by Robert McCammon

  “Please… make the baby stop crying,” Sheila begged.

  “There’s… there’s no baby here. There’s no one here but us.”

  “I hear the crying! I hear it!”

  Swan didn’t know what kind of torment this woman had lived through, but she couldn’t bear to watch her suffer. She squeezed Sheila’s hand and leaned closer to her. “Yes,” she said softly, “I hear the crying, too. A baby crying. Isn’t that right?”

  “Yes! Yes! Make it stop before it’s too late!”

  “Too late? Too late for what?”

  “Too late for it to live!” Sheila’s fingers dug into Swan’s hand. “He’ll kill it if it doesn’t stop crying!”

  “I hear it,” Swan told her. “Wait, wait. The baby’s stopping now. The sound’s going away.”

  “No, it’s not! I can still hear—”

  “The sound’s going away,” Swan repeated, her face only a few inches from Sheila’s. “It’s getting quieter now. Quieter. I can hardly hear it at all. Someone’s taking care of the baby. It’s very quiet now. Very quiet. The crying’s gone.”

  Sheila drew a sharp, sudden breath. Held it for a few seconds, and let it out in a soft, agonized moan. “Gone?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Swan answered. “The baby’s stopped crying. It’s all over.”

  “Is… is the baby still alive?”

  That seemed very important to her. Swan nodded. “Still alive.”

  Sheila’s mouth was slack, and a thin thread of saliva broke over the lower lip and trailed down into her lap. Swan started to work her hand free, but Sheila wouldn’t let her go.

  “You need some help?” Sister offered, but Swan shook her head.

  Sheila’s hand came up, very slowly, and the tips of her fingers touched Swan’s cheek. Swan couldn’t see the woman’s eyes—just two dark craters in the chalky flesh. “Who are you?” Sheila whispered.

  “Swan. My name is Swan. Remember?”

  “Swan,” Sheila repeated, her voice gentle and awed. “The baby… never stopped crying before. Never stopped crying… until it was dead. I never even knew if the baby was a boy or girl. It never stopped crying before. Oh… you’re so pretty.” Her dirty fingers moved across Swan’s face. “So pretty. Men are beasts, you know. They take pretty things… and they make them ugly.” Her voice cracked. She began to cry softly, her cheek resting against the girl’s hand. “I’m so tired of being ugly,” she whispered. “Oh… I’m so tired…”

  Swan let her cry, and she stroked the woman’s head. Her fingers touched scabs and sores.

  After a while, Sheila lifted her head. “Can… can I ask you something?”

  “Yes.”

  Sheila wiped her eyes and snuffled her nose. “Will you… let me brush your hair?”

  Swan stood up and helped Sheila to her feet; then she went to the dressing table and sat down before the mirror. Sheila took a tentative step after her, followed by another. She reached the dresser and picked up a brush that was clotted with hair. Then Sheila’s fingers smoothed out Swan’s mane and she began to brush it, long and slow, stroke after stroke.

  “Why are you here?” Sheila asked. “What do they want with you?”

  Her tone was hushed and reverent. Sister had heard it before, when other people in Mary’s Rest had talked to Swan. Before the girl could answer, Sister said, “They’re going to keep us here. They’re going to make Swan work for them.”

  Sheila stopped brushing. “Work for them? Like… as an RL?”

  “In a way, yes.”

  She paused for a few seconds, then continued slowly brushing Swan’s hair. “Such a pretty thing,” she whispered, and Sister saw her blink heavily, as if trying to grapple with thoughts that she’d rather shut out.

  Sister knew nothing about the woman, but she watched the way Sheila gently used the brush, her fingers moving dreamlike through Swan’s hair to loosen tangles. She saw how Sheila kept admiring Swan’s face in the mirror, then hesitantly lifting her gaze to her own shriveled, worn-out features—and Sister decided to take a chance. “It’s a shame,” she said quietly, “that they’re going to make her ugly.”

  The brush stopped.

  Sister glanced quickly at Swan, who’d begun to realize what the older woman was trying; then Sister came up to stand behind Sheila. “Not all men are beasts,” she said, “but those men are. They’re going to use Swan and make her ugly. They’re going to crush her and destroy her.”

  Sheila looked at Swan in the mirror and then at herself. She stood very still.

  “You can help us,” Sister said. “You can stop them from making her ugly.”

  “No.” Her voice was weak and listless, like that of a weary child. “No, I… can’t. I’m nobody.”

  “You can help us get out of here. Just talk to the guards. Get their attention and move them away from that door for one minute. That’s all.”

  “No… no…”

  Sister put her hand on the woman’s shoulder. “Look at her. Go ahead. Now look at yourself.” Sheila’s eyes shifted. “Look what they’ve made you into.”

  “Ugly,” Sheila whispered. “Ugly. Ugly. Ugly…”

  “Please help us get away.”

  Sheila didn’t reply for perhaps a minute, and Sister was afraid that she’d lost her. Suddenly the other woman began brushing Swan’s hair again. “I can’t,” Sheila said. “They’d kill all of us. It wouldn’t matter to them, because they like to use their guns.”

  “They won’t kill us. The colonel doesn’t want us hurt.”

  “They’d hurt me. Besides, where would you go? Everything’s fucked up. There’s no place to hide.”

  Sister cursed inwardly, but Sheila was right. Even if they did manage to escape the trailer, it would only be a matter of time before the soldiers caught them again. She looked at Swan in the mirror, and Swan shook her head a fraction to communicate the message that it was no use pursuing that tactic. Sister’s attention fell on the glass bottles of perfume atop the dresser. Now she had very little to lose. “Sheila,” she said, “you like pretty things, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  So far, so good. Here comes the kicker. “Would you like to see something that’s really pretty?”

  Sheila looked up. “What?”

  “It’s… a secret. A buried treasure. Would you like to see it?”

  “I know all about buried treasure. Roland buried the stash. He killed the Fat Man, too.”

  Sister disregarded her raving and stuck doggedly to the point. “Sheila,” she said in a confiding tone, “I know where the treasure’s buried. And it’s something that could help us. If you’re a wh—an RL,” she quickly amended, “the guards wouldn’t stop you from leaving. Like you said, you ought to be on the stroll right now. But you’ve never seen anything as beautiful as this treasure is, and if you went where I said and brought it back here, you’d be helping Swan. Isn’t that right, Swan?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “It would have to be our secret, though,” Sister continued, carefully watching Sheila’s slack, emotionless face. “You couldn’t let anybody know where you were going—and you couldn’t let anybody see you digging it up or bringing it back here. You’d have to hide it under your coat. Could you do that?”

  “I… don’t know. I just did my nails.”

  “The buried treasure can stop them from making her ugly,” Sister said, and she saw the thought register with slow power on the woman’s face. “But it’ll be our secret. Just between us roommates. Okay?” Still Sheila didn’t answer, and Sister said, “Please help us.”

  Sheila stared at her reflection in the mirror. She hardly recognized the monster who peered back. The colonel didn’t need her, she realized. Had never needed her, except to use and abuse. Men are beasts, she thought, and she remembered the colonel’s map of a new America, with its sprawling gray Prison Area.

  That was not a country she wanted to live in.

  She put the brush down. She felt Swan watching
her in the mirror, and Sheila knew she could not—must not—let them make such a beautiful thing as ugly as herself.

  “Yes,” she answered finally. “I’ll help you.”

  Eighty-seven

  A feat of magic

  “Stop!” he roared, and as the Jeep skidded in the plowed-up, icy mud of the rubied cornfield the man with the scarlet eye leapt over the vehicle’s side and ran through the stubble.

  I’ve got it now! he thought. It’s mine! And whatever it is—ring of light, mystic gift or crown—I’m going to break it into bits right in front of her eyes!

  The mud clung at his boots as he ran, and he tripped over the corn stubble and almost fell in his fury to get there.

  Gray, murky light painted the clouds. In the wind he could smell fire and blood, and he stepped on the naked corpses in his way.

  Oh, she thought she was so clever! he raged. So clever! Well, now she would understand that he was not to be denied, not to be fucked with; she would understand that it was still his party, after all the smoke had cleared and the bodies were counted.

  At the first tinge of light, the guards had brought Sister to the colonel’s trailer, and she’d been placed in a chair at the center of the room. He’d sat down in a chair before her, while Roland and Macklin had watched. And then he’d leaned his Oriental face close to hers, and he’d said in a Southern drawl, “Where’d ya’ll bury it?”

  She’d gathered up her saliva and spat in his face—but that was all right! Oh, yes! That was just fine! He’d wanted her to fight him, to block her memory with that damned blue light spinning around, so he could press both hands against her cheeks until blood spurted from her nostrils. And then, through the haze of her pain, he’d seen the pickaxe in her mind again, had seen it uplifted and slammed down into the dirt. She’d tried to barricade herself behind the blue light again and blind him with it. But he was too fast for her, and he’d slipped into her mind with ease, since the little bitch wasn’t there to distract him.

  And there it was. There it was. The plank of wood that had RUSTY WEATHERS carved into it.

  She’d buried the glass ring in the cowboy’s grave.

  He’d almost killed her when he saw it, but he wanted her alive to watch him break the glass to pieces. The grave was just ahead, in the clearing between the stubble and the rows of apple tree seedlings that had been scooped from the earth and loaded on another truck. He ran toward the area where he knew the cowboy had been buried. The ground under his boots had been chewed up by truck tires and the feet of soldiers, and the mud tried to grip and hold him.

  He was in the clearing, and he looked around for the makeshift grave marker.

  But it was not there.

  Tire tracks interwove across the clearing like the plaid on the coat of the man he’d ripped apart. He looked in all directions and decided he was not yet in the correct place. He ran on about thirty more yards to the west, stopped and hunted again.

  Nude corpses littered the clearing. He picked them up and flung them aside like broken dolls as he searched for any sign of the grave.

  After about ten minutes of frenzied search, he found the grave marker—but it was lying flat and covered with mud. He got down on his knees and started clawing at the ground around the marker, digging the dirt up and throwing it behind him like a dog after a mislaid bone. His hands only found more dirt.

  He heard voices and looked up. Four soldiers were prowling the field for anything the scavenger brigades might have missed. “You! Start digging!” he shouted at them—and they stared stupidly at him until he realized he’d spoken in Russian. “Dig!” he commanded, finding his English again. “Get down on your hands and knees and dig this whole fucking field up!”

  One of the men ran. The other three hesitated, and a soldier called, “What are we digging for?”

  “A bag! A leather bag! It’s here somewhere! It’s—” And then he abruptly stopped and gazed around at the muddy, ravaged clearing. Armored cars and trucks had been moving across it all night. Hundreds of soldiers had marched through the clearing and the cornfield. The marker might have been knocked down an hour, three hours or six hours earlier. It might have been dragged under the wheels of a truck, or kicked aside by the boots of fifty men. There was no way to tell where the grave had actually been, and frantic rage sizzled through him. He lifted his head and screamed with anger.

  The three soldiers fled, tumbling over one another in their panic to get away.

  The man with the scarlet eye picked up the nude corpse of a man by the neck and one stiff, outstretched arm. He swung it away, and then he kicked the head of another body like a football. He fell upon a third corpse and twisted its head until the spine snapped with a noise like off-key guitar strings. Then, still seething with rage, he got on all fours like an animal and searched for someone living to kill.

  But he was alone with the dead.

  Wait! he thought. Wait!

  He sat up again, his clothes filthy and his shifting face splattered with black mud, and he grinned. He began to giggle, then to chuckle, and finally he laughed so loud that the few remaining dogs that slinked through the alleys heard and howled in response.

  If it’s lost, he realized, no one else can have it either! The earth’s swallowed it up! It’s gone, and nobody will ever find it again!

  He kept laughing, thinking about how stupid he’d been. The glass ring was gone forever! And Sister herself was the one who’d thrown it away in the mud!

  He felt a lot better now, a lot stronger and more clearheaded. Things had worked out just as they should. It was still his party, because the little bitch belonged to Macklin, the human hand had destroyed Mary’s Rest and Sister had consigned her treasure to the black, unforgiving dirt—where it would lie forever next to a cowboy’s charred bones.

  He stood up, satisfied that the grave was lost, and began striding across the field to where his driver waited with the Jeep. He turned back for one last look, and his teeth glinted white against his mud-smeared face. It would take a feat of magic, he mused, to make that damned glass ring reappear—and he was the only magician he knew.

  Now we march, he thought. We take the little bitch with us, and we take Sister, that big nigger and the boy, too, to keep her in line. The rest of the dogs can live in these miserable shacks until they rot—which won’t be very long.

  Now we go to West Virginia and Warwick Mountain. To find God. He smiled, and the driver who was waiting just ahead saw that awful, inhuman grimace and shuddered. The man with the scarlet eye was very eager to meet “God,” very eager indeed. After that, the little bitch would go to her prison farm, and then… who knows?

  He liked being a five-star general. It was a task he seemed particularly well suited for, and as he swept his gaze across the plain of heaped-up corpses he felt like the king of all he surveyed, and very much at home.

  Eighty-eight

  The way out

  At the crash of the dinner gong, Josh started salivating like an animal.

  The guard was beating on the truck’s rear door with his rifle butt, signaling the three prisoners to move to the far end of their cell-on-wheels. Josh, Robin and Brother Timothy knew that noise very well. Robin had held out the longest, refusing to eat any of the watery gruel for four days—until Josh had held him down and forcefed him, and afterward, when Robin wanted to fight, Josh had knocked him flat and told him he was going to live whether he liked it or not.

  “What for?” Robin had asked, aching to fight but too smart to charge the black giant again. “They’re just going to kill us anyway!”

  “I don’t really give a crap whether you live or not, you pissant punk!” Josh had told him, trying to make the boy mad enough to stay alive. “If you’d been a man, you would’ve protected Swan! But they’re not going to kill us today. Otherwise they wouldn’t have wasted the food. And what about Swan? You’re just going to give up and leave her to the wolves?”

  “Man, you’re a jive fool! She’s probably already dead,
and Sister, too!”

  “No way. They’re keeping Swan and Sister alive—and us, too. So from now on you’ll eat, or by God, I’ll shove your face in that bowl and make you suck it up your nostrils! Understand?”

  “Big man,” Robin had sneered, crawling away into his customary corner and wrapping his dirty, threadbare brown blanket around himself. But from that day on he’d eaten his food without hesitation.

  The truck’s metal rear door was perforated with thirty-seven small round holes—both Josh and Robin had counted them many times, and they had devised a mental connect-the-dots-type game with them—which let in dim gray light and air. They were useful peepholes, too, through which to see what was going on in the camp and the landscape they were passing over. But now the door was unbolted, and it slid upward on its rollers. The guard with the rifle—who Robin less-than-affectionately called Sergeant Shitpants—barked, “Buckets out!”

  Two more guards stood by with guns aimed and ready as first Josh, then Robin and Brother Timothy brought their waste buckets out.

  “Step down!” Sergeant Shitpants ordered. “Single file! Move it!”

  Josh squinted in the hazy light of morning. The camp was gearing up to move again; tents were being packed up, vehicles being checked over and gassed up from drums on the back of supply trucks. Josh had noted that the number of gas drums was dwindling fast, and the Army of Excellence had left many broken-down vehicles behind. He looked around at the land as he walked about ten yards away from the truck and dumped his bucket into a ravine. Dense thicket and leafless woods lay on the far side of the ravine, and in the misty distance were snow-covered, hard-edged mountains. The highway they’d been traveling on led up into those mountains, but Josh didn’t know exactly where they were. Time was jumbled and confused; he thought it had been two weeks since they’d left Mary’s Rest, but he wasn’t even sure of that. Maybe it was more like three weeks. Anyway, by this time they’d left Missouri far behind, he figured.