1987 - Swan Song v4

by Robert McCammon

  And now it was time. Yes. Now it was time.

  Because for her the dreamwalk path had ended. When she looked into the glass, she saw beautiful jewels and threads of gold and silver, but nothing more. Her dreamwalking was done.

  It was for Swan to take the next step.

  Sister got up off the mattress and approached Swan, holding the shining circle of glass before her. Swan realized it was the image she’d seen in Rusty’s magic mirror. “Stand up,” Sister said, and her voice quavered.

  Swan did.

  “This belongs to you,” Sister said. “It always belonged to you. I’ve just been its keeper.” Her fingers traced a filament of platinum, and it sizzled within the glass. “But I want you to remember one thing, and hold it fast: If a miracle can make sand into something like this… then just think—just dream—of what people can be.” And she placed the crown on Swan’s head.

  It was a perfect fit.

  Golden light suddenly flared around the crown, receded and flared again. The brilliant glow made both Sister and Sheila squint, and down deep within the gold more colors bloomed like a garden in sunlight.

  Sheila put a hand to her mouth; her eyes overflowed, and she began laughing and crying at the same time as the colors washed over her face.

  Sister felt heat radiating from the glass, as startling and strong as if she’d caught a faceful of sun. It was getting so bright that she had to retreat a step, her hand rising to shield her eyes.

  “What’s happening?” Swan asked, aware of the brightness and a tingling sensation of warmth in her scalp. She was getting scared, and she started to take the crown off, but Sister said, “No! Don’t touch it!”

  The golden, fiery light had begun to ripple through Swan’s hair. Swan stood as rigidly as if balancing a book on her head, scared to death but excited, too.

  The golden light flared again, and in the next instant Swan’s hair seemed to be on fire. The light was spreading over her forehead and cheeks in tendrils, and then Swan’s face became a mask of light—a wonderful and terrifying sight that almost knocked Sister to her knees. The fierce glow spread over Swan’s throat and neck and began to wind like golden smoke around her shoulders and arms, rippling down over her hands and around each finger.

  Sister reached toward Swan; her hand entered the radiance and touched Swan’s cheek—but it felt like armor plate, though she could still see the faint impression of Swan’s features and the girl’s eyes. Sister’s fingers could not reach Swan’s skin—not her cheeks, her chin, her forehead—not anywhere.

  Oh, God, Sister thought—because she’d realized the crown was weaving an armor of light around Swan’s body.

  It had covered her almost to the waist. Swan felt as if she were standing at the center of a torch, but the warmth was not unpleasant, and she saw the fiery reflection on the walls and the faces of Sister and Sheila with vision only slightly tinged golden. She looked down at her arms, saw them ablaze; she curled her fingers, and they felt fine—no pain, no stiffness, no sense of anything around them at all. The light moved with her, cleaving to her flesh like a second skin. The fire had begun to crawl down her legs.

  She moved, cocooned by light, to the mirror. The sight of what she was becoming was too much for her. She reached up, grasped the crown and lifted it off her head.

  The golden glow faded almost at once. It pulsed… pulsed… and the armor of light evaporated like drifting mist.

  Then Swan was as she’d been before, just a girl holding a ring of sparkling glass.

  She couldn’t find her voice for a minute. Then she held the crown to Sister, and said, “I… I think… you’d better keep it for me.”

  Slowly, Sister lifted her hand and accepted it. She returned the crown to the satchel and zipped it up. Then, moving like a sleepwalker, she pulled up the blanket and put the satchel back in the mattress. But her eyes still buzzed with golden fire, and as long as she lived she’d never forget what she’d just witnessed.

  She wondered what might have happened if, as an experiment, she’d balled up her fist and tried to strike Swan in the face. She didn’t want to suffer broken knuckles to find out. Would the armor have turned away the blade of a knife? A bullet? A bomb’s shrapnel?

  Of all the powers the circle of glass held, she knew that this was one of the greatest—and it had been saved for Swan alone.

  Sheila held her own piece of the crown up before her face. The red glint was stronger; she was sure of it. She got up and hid that in the mattress, too.

  And perhaps thirty seconds later, there was a loud banging at the door. “Sheila!” a guard called. “We’re getting ready to move out!”

  “Yeah,” she answered. “Yeah. We’re ready.”

  “Everything okay in there?”

  “Yeah. Fine.”

  “I’ll be driving the rig today. We’ll be hitting the road in about fifteen minutes.” A chain rattled as it was being fastened around the doorknob and across the door; then there was the solid click of a padlock. “Now you’re nice and tight.”

  “Thanks, Danny!” Sheila said, and when the guard had gone Sheila knelt on the floor beside Swan and pressed the girl’s hand against her cheek.

  But Swan was lost in thought. Her mind had turned to the visions of green fields and orchards. Were those images of things that would be, or things that could be? Were they visions of the prison farm, the fields tended by slaves and stuttering machines, or were they places free of barbed wire and brutality?

  She didn’t know, but she understood that each mile they traveled brought her closer to the answer, whatever it was to be.

  In Macklin’s Command Center, preparations were being made to get underway. The fuel allocation reports from the Mechanical Brigade lay on his desk, and Roland stood next to Friend in front of the West Virginia map tacked to the wall. A red line marked their progress along Highway 60. Roland got as close to Friend as he could; he was tortured with fever, and the cold that came off the other man comforted him. Last night the pain in his face had almost driven him crazy, and he swore he’d felt the bones shift under the bandages.

  “We’re down to nine drums,” Macklin said. “If we don’t find any more gasoline, we’re going to have to start leaving vehicles behind.” He looked up from his reports. “That goddamned mountain road’ll make the engines strain. They’ll use more gas. I still say we give it up and go find fuel.”

  They didn’t answer.

  “Did you hear me? We’ve got to have more gas before we start up that—”

  “What’s wrong with ’Nel Macreen today?” Friend turned toward him, and Macklin saw with a start of horror that the man’s face had changed again; the eyes were slits, the hair black and plastered down. His flesh was pale yellow—and Macklin was looking at a mask that took him back to Vietnam and the pit where the Cong guards had dropped their refuse on him. ’Nel Macreen gots a plobrem?”

  Macklin’s tongue had turned to lead.

  Friend came toward him, his Vietnamese face grinning. “Onry plobrem ’Nel Macreen gots is gettin’ us where we wants go.” His accent changed from pidgin English back to a husky American voice. “So you get rid of the trucks and shit. So what?”

  “So… we can’t carry as many soldiers or supplies if we leave trucks behind. I mean… we’re losing strength every day.”

  “Well, what do you say we do, then?” Friend pulled another chair toward him, turned it around and sat down with his arms crossed on the chair’s back. “Where do we go to find gasoline?”

  “I… don’t know. We’ll have to search for—”

  “You don’t know. And so far the towns you’ve raided were zero for gas, right? So you want to backtrack and fuck around until every truck and car is running on empty?” He cocked his head to one side. “What do you say, Roland?”

  Roland’s heart jumped every time Friend addressed him. The fever had slowed his mind, and his body felt sluggish and heavy. He was still the King’s Knight, but he’d been wrong about something: Colone
l Macklin was not the King, and neither was he his own King. Oh, no—the man who sat in the chair before Macklin’s desk was the King. The undisputed, the one and only King, who did not eat or drink and whom he’d never seen either crap or piss either, as if he didn’t have time for such mundane things.

  “I say we keep going on.” Roland knew many armored cars and trucks had already been left behind; the tank had broken down two days out of Mary’s Rest, and several million dollars worth of Uncle Sam’s machinery had been abandoned on the Missouri roadside. “We go on. We’ve got to find out what’s on that mountain.”

  “Why?” Macklin asked. “What’s it to us? I say we—”

  “Silence,” Friend commanded. The slitted Vietnamese eyes bored into him. “Must we go around about this again, Colonel? Roland feels that Brother Timothy saw an underground complex on Warwick Mountain, complete with an operating electrical supply and a mainframe computer. Now, why’s the power still on up there, and what purpose does the complex serve? I agree with Roland that we should find out.”

  “There might be some gasoline up there, too,” Roland added.

  “Right. So going to Warwick Mountain might solve your problem. Yes?”

  Macklin kept his gaze averted. In his mind he saw the girl’s face again, achingly beautiful. He saw her face at night, when he closed his eyes, like a vision from another world. He could not stand his own smell when he awakened. “Yes,” he answered, in a small, quiet voice.

  “I kneeewww you’d see the light, brotha!” Friend said, in the high, careening voice of a Southern revival preacher.

  A ripping noise made Friend’s head swivel.

  Roland was falling; he’d reached out for support and was taking half the map with him. He hit the floor.

  Friend giggled. “Fall down go boom.”

  In that instant Macklin almost lunged forward and slammed the palm of his right hand into the monster’s skull, almost drove the nails deep into the head of the beast that had taken his army from him and made him into a snuffling coward—but as the thought thrilled through him and he tensed for action, a small slit opened in the back of Friend’s head, about four inches above the nape of the neck.

  In the slit was a staring scarlet eye with a silver pupil.

  Macklin sat very still, his lips drawn back from his teeth in a grimace.

  The scarlet eye suddenly shriveled and disappeared, and Friend’s head turned toward him again. He was smiling cordially. “Please don’t take me for a fool,” he said.

  Something hit the roof of the Airstream trailer: bump! Then another: bump bump! Followed in the next few seconds by a bumping noise that seemed to sweep the length of the trailer and gently rock it from side to side.

  Macklin got up on rubbery legs and went around the desk to the door. He opened it and stood looking out at golf ball-sized hail whirling down from the leaden sky, bumping and clattering on the windshields, hoods and roofs of the other vehicles parked around. Thunder echoed in the clouds like a bass drum in a barrel, and an electric-blue spear of lightning struck somewhere in the distant mountains. In the next minute the hail stopped, and sheets of black, cold rain began falling over the encampment.

  A boot thrust out and hit him in the small of the back. He lost his balance and tumbled down to the bottom of the steps, where the armed guards stared at him in stunned surprise.

  Macklin sat up on his knees as the rain struck him in the face and crawled through his hair.

  Friend stood in the doorway. “You’re riding in the truck with the driver,” he announced. “This is my trailer now.”

  “Shoot him!” Macklin bawled. “Shoot the bastard!”

  The guards hesitated; one of them lifted his M-16 and took aim.

  “You’ll die in three seconds,” the monster promised.

  The guard wavered, looked down at Macklin and then looked at Friend again. He abruptly lowered the rifle and stepped back, rubbing rain from his eyes.

  “Help the colonel out of the rain,” Friend commanded. “Then spread the word: We’re moving out in ten minutes. Anyone who’s not ready will be left behind.” He closed the door.

  Macklin shrugged off help as he got to his feet. “It’s mine!” he shouted. “You won’t take it from me!”

  The door remained shut.

  “You won’t… take it… from me,” Macklin said, but no one was listening anymore.

  Engines began to mutter and growl like awakening beasts. The smell of gasoline and exhaust was in the air, and the rain reeked of brimstone.

  “You won’t,” Macklin whispered, and then he started walking toward the truck that hauled the Command Center as the rain beat down like hammer blows on his shoulders.

  Ninety

  Roland’s good, long look

  The Army of Excellence left a trail of broken-down armored cars, trucks and trailers in its wake as it turned north onto Highway 219 and began to climb along the steep western ridge of the Allegheny Mountains.

  The land was covered with dead forests, and an occasional ghost town crumbled alongside the ribbon of road. There were no people, but a scouting party in a Jeep pursued and shot two deer near the ruins of Friars Hill—and they came across something else that was worth reporting: an ebony, frozen lake. At its center was the tail section of a large aircraft jutting up from the depths. Two of the scouts started across the lake to investigate it, but the ice cracked under them, and they drowned crying for help.

  Rain alternated with snow flurries as the Army of Excellence climbed past dead Hillsboro, Mill Point, Seebert, Buckeye and Marlington. A supply truck ran out of gas twelve feet from a rusted green sign that said Entering Pocahontas County, and the vehicle was pushed into a ravine to let the others pass.

  The column was stopped three miles over the county line by a storm of black rain and hail that made driving impossible. Another truck went into the ravine, and a tractor-trailer rig choked on its last swallow of gasoline.

  As the rain and hail battered down on the Airstream trailer’s roof Roland Croninger awakened. He’d been flung into a corner of the room like a sack of laundry, and his first realization was that he’d messed his britches.

  The second was that what looked like lumps of clay and torn, grimy bandages lay on the floor around his head.

  He was still wearing the goggles. They felt very tight. His face and head throbbed, gorged with blood, and his mouth felt funny—kind of twisted.

  My… face, he thought. My face… has changed.

  He sat up. A lantern glowed on the desk nearby. The trailer shuddered under the storm.

  And suddenly Friend knelt down in front of him, and a pale, handsome mask with close-cropped blond hair and ebony eyes peered curiously at him.

  “Hi there,” Friend said, with a gentle smile. “Have a nice sleep?”

  “I… hurt,” Roland answered. The sound of his voice made his skin creep; it had been a diseased rattle.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. You’ve been sleeping for quite some time. We’re just a few miles away from that town Brother Timothy told us about. Yes, you really got your beauty sleep, didn’t you?”

  Roland started to lift his hands to touch his new face, and his heartbeat deafened him.

  “Let me,” Friend said—and he held up one hand. In it was a broken piece of mirror.

  Roland saw and his head jerked away. Friend’s other hand shot out, cupping the back of Roland’s neck. “Oh, don’t be bashful,” the monster whispered. “Take a good, long look.”

  Roland screamed.

  Internal pressure had buckled the bones into hideous, protruding ridges and collapsed gullies. The flesh was sickly yellow, cracked and pitted like an atomic battleground. Red-edged craters had opened in his forehead and his right cheek, exposing the chalky bone. His hair had receded far back on his head and was coarse and white, and his lower jaw jutted forward as if it had been brutally yanked from its sockets. But the most terrible thing, the thing that made Roland begin to wail and gibber, was that his face had been tw
isted so that it was almost on the side of his head, as if his features had melted and dried hideously askew. In his mouth, the teeth had been ground down to stubs.

  He flailed at Friend’s hand, knocked the glass aside and scurried into the corner. Friend sat back on his haunches and laughed, while Roland gripped the goggles with both hands and tried to pull them off. The flesh tore around them, and blood ran down to his chin. The pain was too much; the goggles had grown into his skin.

  Roland shrieked, and Friend shrieked with him in unholy harmony.

  Finally, Friend snorted and stood up—but Roland grasped his legs and clung to him, sobbing.

  “I’m a King’s Knight,” he gibbered. “King’s Knight. Sir Roland. King’s Knight… King’s Knight…”

  Friend bent down again. The young man was wasted, but he still had talent. He was actually a wonderful organizer of the last gasoline supplies and the food, and he’d made Brother Timothy sing like a castrato. Friend ran a hand through Roland’s old-man hair.

  “King’s Knight,” Roland whispered, burrowing his head into Friend’s shoulder. Tumbling through his mind were scenes of Earth House, the amputation of Macklin’s hand, the crawl through the tunnel to freedom, the dirtwart land, the murder of Freddie Kempka and on and on in a vicious panorama. “I’ll serve you,” he whimpered. “I’ll serve the King. Call me Sir Roland. Yes, sir! I showed him, I showed him how a King’s Knight gets even, yes, sir, yes, sir!”

  “Shhhhh,” Friend said, almost crooning. “Hush, now. Hush.”

  Finally, Roland’s sobbing ceased. He spoke drowsily: “Do you… do you love me?”

  “Like a mirror,” Friend answered. And the young man said no more.

  The storm slacked off within an hour. The Army of Excellence struggled onward again, through the deepening twilight.

  Soon the scout Jeep came back along the mountain road, and the soldiers reported to General Friend that there were clapboard buildings about a mile ahead. On one of those buildings was a faded sign that read Slatyfork General Store.