Swan Song (15 page)

The ring of glass suddenly exploded into fiery light, and for an instant Sister Creep thought it had burst into flame in her hand. She howled and dropped it, and Artie yelled, “Jesus!”

The light went out.

Sister Creep’s hand was trembling. She looked at her palm and fingers to make sure she hadn’t been burned; there’d been no heat, just that blinding flare of light. She could still see it, pulsing behind her eyeballs.

She reached toward it, then pulled her hand back again. Artie came closer and bent down a few feet away.

Sister Creep let her fingers graze the glass before she jerked her hand away once more. The glass was smooth, like cool velvet. She let her fingers linger on it, and then she gripped it in her hand and picked it up from the ashes.

The circle of glass remained dark.

Sister Creep stared at it and felt her heart pounding.

Deep within the glass circle, there was a flicker of crimson.

It began to grow like a flame, to spread to other points within the ring, pulsing, pulsing, getting stronger and brighter by the second.

A ruby the size of Sister Creep’s thumbnail flared bright red; another smaller one winked with light, like a match glowing in the dark. A third ruby burned like a comet, and then a fourth and a fifth, embedded deep inside the cool glass, began to come to life. The red glow pulsed, pulsed-and Sister realized its rhythm was in time with her own heartbeat.

More rubies glinted, flared, burned like coals. A diamond suddenly glowed a clear blue-white, and a four-carat sapphire exploded into dazzling cobalt fire. As Sister Creep’s heartbeat quickened, so did the bursting into light of the hundreds of jewels trapped within the circle of glass. An emerald glowed cool green, a pear-shaped diamond burned white hot and incandescent, a topaz pulsed a dark reddish brown, and now the rubies, sapphires, diamonds and emeralds by the dozen were awakening with light; the light rippled, traveling along the spider web lines that wove all through the glass. The lines were threads of precious metals-gold, silver and platinum-that had melted and been trapped as well, and as they ignited like sizzling fuses they set off still more explosions of emerald, topaz and amethyst’s deep purple.

The entire ring of glass glowed like a multicolored circle of fire, yet there was no heat under Sister Creep’s fingers. It was pulsating rapidly now, as was her heartbeat, and the vibrant, stunning colors grew still brighter.

She had never seen anything like this-never, not even in the display windows of any store along Fifth Avenue. Jewels of incredible color and clarity were caught within the glass, some of them upwards of five and six carats, some only tiny specks that nevertheless burned with ferocious energy. The glass circle pulsed… pulsed… pulsed…

“Lady?” Artie whispered, his swollen eyes shining with light “Can I… hold it?”

She was reluctant to give it up, but he stared at it with such wonder and longing that she could not refuse him.

His burned fingers closed around it, and as it left Sister Creep’s grasp the glass circle’s pulse changed, picking up Artie Wisco’s heartbeat. The colors subtly changed as well, as more deep blues and greens swelled and the white-hot glare of diamonds and rubies faded a fraction. Artie caressed it, and its velvety surface reminded him of the way his wife’s skin had felt when she was young and they were newlyweds just starting out. He thought of how much he loved his wife, and how he longed for her. He had been wrong, he realized in that instant. There was somewhere to go. Home, he thought. I’ve got to get back home.

After a few minutes he carefully gave the object back to Sister Creep. It changed again, and she sat holding it between her hands and peering into its beautiful depths.

“Home,” Artie whispered, and the woman looked up. Artie’s mind would not let go of the memory of his wife’s soft skin. “I’ve got to get back home,” he said, his voice getting stronger. He suddenly blinked as if he’d been slapped across the face, and Sister Creep saw tears glint in his eyes.

“There… ain’t no more phones, are there?” he asked. “And no policemen, either.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t think so.”

“Oh.” He nodded, looked at her and then back at the pulsating colors. “You… ought to go home, too,” he said.

She smiled grimly. “I don’t have anywhere to go.”

“Why don’t you go with me, then?”

She laughed. “Go with you? Mister, haven’t you noticed the buses and cabs are a little off schedule today?”

“I’ve got shoes on my feet. So do you. My legs still work, and yours do, too.” He pulled his gaze away from the ring of fiery light and peered around at the destruction as if seeing it clearly for the first time. “Dear God,” he said. “Oh, dear God, why?”

“I don’t think… God had much to do with this,” Sister Creep said. “I remember… I prayed for the Rapture, and I prayed for Judgment Day-but I never prayed for anything like this. Never.”

Artie nodded toward the glass ring. “You oughta hold onto that thing, lady. You found it, so I guess it’s yours. It might be worth something someday.” He shook his head in awe. “That’s not junk, lady,” he said. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s sure not junk.” He suddenly stood up and lifted the collar of his mink coat around his neck. “Well… I hope you make put okay, lady.” With one last longing gaze at the glass ring, he turned and started walking.

“Hey!” Sister stood up, too. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“I told you,” he replied without looking back, “I gotta get home.”

“Are you crazy? Detroit’s not just around the block!”

He didn’t stop. He’s nuts! she thought. Crazier’n I am! She put the circle of glass into her new Gucci bag, and as she took her hand away from it the pulsing ceased and the colors instantly faded, as if the thing were going to sleep again. She walked after Artie. “Hey! Wait! What are you going to do about food and water?”

“I guess I’ll find it when I need it! If I can’t find it, I’ll do without! What choice do I have, lady?”

“Not much,” she agreed.

He stopped and faced her. “Right. Hell, I don’t know if I’ll get there. I don’t even know if I’ll get out of this damned junkyard! But this ain’t my home. If a person’s gotta die, he oughta die tryin’ to go home to somebody he loves, don’t you think?” He shrugged. “Maybe I’ll find some more people. Maybe I’ll find a car. If you want to stay here, that’s your business, but Artie Wisco’s got shoes on his feet, and Artie Wisco’s walkin’.” He waved and started off again.

He’s not crazy anymore, she thought.

A cold rain began falling, the drops black and oily. Sister Creep opened her bag again and touched the misshapen glass circle with one finger to see what would happen.

A single sapphire blazed to life, and she was reminded of the spinning blue light flashing in her face. A memory was close-very close-but before she could grasp it, it had streaked away again. It was something, she knew, that she was not yet ready to remember.

She lifted her finger, and the sapphire went dark.

One step, she told herself. One step and then the next gets you where you’re going.

But what if you don’t know where to go?

“Hey!” she shouted at Artie. “At least look for an umbrella! And try to find a bag like the one I’ve got, so you can put food and stuff in it!” Christ! she thought. This guy wouldn’t make it a mile! She ought to go with him, she decided, if only to keep him from breaking his neck. “Wait for me!” she shouted. And then she walked a few yards to the geyser of the broken water main and stood under it, letting the water wash the dust, ashes and blood off her. She opened her mouth and drank until her stomach sloshed. Now hunger took thirst’s place. Maybe she could find something to eat and maybe not, she considered. But at least she was no longer thirsty. One step, she thought. One step at a time.

Artie was waiting for her. Sister Creep’s instincts caused her to gather up a few smaller chunks of glass with jewels embedded in them, and she wrapped them in a ragged blue scarf and put them into her Gucci bag. She nosed around the wreckage, a bag lady’s paradise, and found a pretty jade box, but it played a tune when she lifted the lid and the sweet music in the midst of so much death saddened her. She returned the box to the broken concrete.

Then she started walking toward Artie Wisco through the chilly rain, and she left the ruins of the magic place behind.

Seventeen - [Lights Out]

“Gopher’s in the hole!” PawPaw Briggs raved. “Lord God, we come a cropper!”

Josh Hutchins had no idea what time it was, or how long they’d been there; he’d been sleeping a lot and having awful dreams about Rose and the boys running before a tornado of fire. He was amazed that he could still breathe; the air was stale, but it seemed okay. Josh expected to close his eyes very soon and not awaken again. The pain of his burns was bearable as long as he stayed still. He lay listening to the old man babble on, and Josh thought that suffocating probably wouldn’t be such a bad way to die; maybe it was only like getting the hiccups just before you went to sleep, and you weren’t really aware that your lungs were hitching for oxygen. He felt sorriest for the little girl. So young, he thought. So young. Didn’t even have a chance to grow up.

Well, he decided, I’m going back to sleep now. Maybe this would be the last time. He thought of those people in the wrestling arena at Concordia and wondered how many of them were dead or dying right now, this minute. Poor Johnny Lee Richwine! Busted leg one day, and this the next! Shit. It’s not fair… not fair at all…

Something tugged at his shirt. The movement sent little panics of pain shooting through his nerves.

“Mister?” Swan asked. She’d heard his breathing and had crawled to him through the darkness. “Can you hear me, mister?” She tugged at his shirt again for good measure.

“Yes,” he answered. “I can hear you. What is it?”

“My mama’s sick. Can you help her?”

Josh sat upright. “What’s wrong with her?”

“She’s breathing funny. Please come help her.”

The child’s voice was strained, but she wasn’t giving in to tears. Tough little kid, Josh thought. “Okay. Take my hand and lead me to her.” He held his hand out, and after a few seconds she found it in the darkness and clenched three of his fingers in her hand.

Swan led him, both of them crawling, across the basement to where her mother lay in the dirt. Swan had been asleep, curled close to her mother, when she was awakened by a noise like the rasp of a rusted hinge. Her mother’s body was hot and damp, but Darleen was shivering. “Mama?” Swan whispered. “Mama, I brought the giant to help you.”

“I just need to rest, honey.” The voice was drowsy. “I’m okay. Don’t you worry about me.”

“Are you hurting anywhere?” Josh asked her.

“Shitfire, what a question. I’m hurtin’ all over. Christ, I don’t know what hit me. I was feeling’ fine just a while ago-like I had a sunburn, is all. But, shit! I’ve had worse sunburns than this!” She swallowed thickly. “I sure could use a beer right now.”

“There might be something down here to drink.” Josh started searching, uncovering more dented cans. Without a light, though, he couldn’t tell what they contained. He was thirsty and hungry, too, and he knew the child must be. PawPaw could surely use some water. He found a can of something that had burst open and was leaking out, and he tasted the liquid. Sugary peach juice. A can of peaches. “Here.” He held the can to the woman’s mouth so she could drink.

Darleen slurped at it, then pushed it weakly away. “What’re you tryin’ to do, poison me? I said I need a beer!”

“Sorry. This is the best I can do for now.” He gave the can to Swan and told her to drink.

“When’re they comin’ to dig us out of this shithole?” Darleen asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe…” He paused. “Maybe soon.”

“Jesus! I feel like… one side of me is bein’ cooked and the other’s in a deep freeze. It hit me all of a sudden.”

“You’ll be all right,” Josh said; it was ridiculous, but he didn’t know what else to say. He sensed the child close to him, silent and listening. She knows, he thought. “Just rest, and you’ll get your strength back.”

“See, Swan? I told you I was gonna be fine.”

Josh could do nothing else. He took the can of peaches from Swan and crawled over to where PawPaw lay raving. “Come a cropper!” PawPaw babbled. “Oh, Lord… did you find the key? Now how’m I gonna start a truck without a key?”

Josh put an arm under the old man’s head, tilting it up and then putting the broken can to his lips. PawPaw was both shivering and burning up with fever. “Drink it,” Josh said, and the old man was as obedient as an infant with a bottle.

“Mister? Are we going to get out of here?”

Josh hadn’t realized the little girl was nearby. Her voice was still calm, and she was whispering so her mother couldn’t hear. “Sure,” he replied. The child was silent, and again Josh had the feeling that even in the dark she’d seen through his lie. “I don’t know,” he amended. “Maybe. Maybe not. It depends.”

“Depends on what?”

Not going to let me off the hook, are you? he thought. “I guess it depends on what’s left outside. Do you understand what’s happened?”

“Something blew up,” she answered.

“Right. But a lot of other places might have blown up, too. Whole cities. There might be…” He hesitated. Go ahead and say it. You might as well get it out. “There might be millions of people dead, or trapped just like we are. So there might not be anybody left to get us out.”

She paused for a moment. Then she replied, “That’s not what I asked. I asked: Are we going to get out of here?”

Josh realized she was asking if they were going to try to get themselves out, instead of waiting for someone else to come help them. “Well,” he said, “if we had a bulldozer handy, I’d say yes. Otherwise, I don’t think we’re going anywhere anytime soon.”

“My mama’s real sick,” Swan said, and this time her voice cracked. “I’m afraid.”

“So am I,” Josh admitted. The little girl sobbed just once, and then she stopped as if she’d pulled herself together with tremendous willpower. Josh reached out and found her arm. Blisters broke on her skin. Josh flinched and withdrew his hand. “How about you?” he asked her. “Are you hurting?”

“My skin hurts. It feels like needles and pins. And my stomach’s sick. I had to throw up a while ago, but I did it in the corner.”

“Yeah, I feel kind of sick myself.” He felt a pressing need to urinate as well, and he was going to have to figure out a makeshift sanitation system. They had plenty of canned food and fruit juices, and no telling what else was buried around them in the dirt. Stop it! he thought, because he’d allowed himself a flicker of hope. The air’s going to be gone soon! There’s no way we can survive down here!

But he knew also that they were in the only place that could have sheltered them from the blast. With all that dirt above them, the radiation might not get through. Josh was tired and his bones ached, but he no longer felt the urge to lie down and die; if he did, he thought, the little girl’s fate would be sealed, too. But if he fought off the weariness and got to work organizing the cans of food, he might be able to keep them all alive for… how long? he wondered. One more day? Three more? A week?

“How old are you?” he asked.

“I’m nine,” she answered.

“Nine,” he repeated softly, and he shook his head. Rage and pity warred in his soul. A nine-year-old child ought to be playing in the summer sun. A nine-year-old child shouldn’t be down in a dark basement with one foot in the grave. It wasn’t fair! Damn it to Hell, it wasn’t right!

“What’s your name?”

It was a minute before he could find his voice. “Josh. And yours is Swan?”

“Sue Wanda. But my mama calls me Swan. How’d you get to be a giant?”

There were tears in his eyes, but he smiled anyway. “I guess I ate my mama’s cornbread when I was about your age.”

“Cornbread made you a giant?”

“Well, I was always big. I used to play some football-first at Auburn University, then for the New Orleans Saints.”

“Do you still?”

“Nope. I’m a… I was a wrestler,” he said. “Professional wrestling. I was the bad guy.”

“Oh.” Swan thought about that. She recalled that one of her many uncles, Uncle Chuck, used to like to go to the wrestling matches in Wichita and watched them on TV, too. “Did you like that? Being the bad guy, I mean?”

“It’s kind of a game, really. I just acted bad. And I don’t know if I liked it or not. It was just something I started do-”

“Gopher’s in the hole!” PawPaw said. “Lordy, lookit him go!”

“Why does he keep talking about a gopher?” Swan asked.

“He’s hurt. He doesn’t know what he’s saying.” PawPaw rambled on about finding his bedroom slippers and something about the crops needing rain, then he lapsed again into silence. Heat radiated off the old man’s body as if from an open oven, and Josh knew he couldn’t last much longer. God only knew what looking into that blast had done inside his skull.

“Mama said we were going to Blakeman,” Swan said, pulling her attention away from the old man. She knew he was dying. “She said we were going home. Where were you going?”

“Garden City. I was supposed to wrestle there.”

“Is that your home?”

“No. My home’s down in Alabama-a long, long way from here.”

“Mama said we were going to go see my granddaddy. He lives in Blakeman. Does your family live in Alabama?”

He thought of Rose and his two sons. But they were part of someone else’s life now-if indeed they were still alive. “I don’t have any family,” Josh replied.

“Don’t you have anybody who loves you?” Swan asked.

“No,” he said. “I don’t think so.” He heard Darleen moan, and he said, “You’d better see to your mother, huh?”

“Yes, sir.” Swan started to crawl away, but then she looked back into the darkness where the black giant was. “I knew something terrible was going to happen,” she said. “I knew it the night we left Uncle Tommy’s trailer. I tried to tell my mama, but she didn’t understand.”

“How did you know?”

“The fireflies told me,” she said. “I saw it in their lights.”

“Sue Wanda?” Darleen called weakly. “Swan? Where are you?”

Swan said, “Here, Mama,” and she crawled back to her mother’s side.

The fireflies told her, Josh thought. Right. At least the little girl had a strong imagination. That was good; sometimes the imagination could be a useful place to hide in when the going got rough.

But he suddenly remembered the cloud of locusts that had flown through his car. “Been flyin’ out of the fields by the thousands for the last two, three days,” PawPaw had told him. “Kinda peculiar.”

Had the locusts known something was about to happen in those cornfields? Josh wondered. Had they been able to sense disaster-maybe smell it on the wind, or in the earth itself?

He turned his mind to more important matters. First he had to find a corner to pee into before his bladder burst. He’d never had to crouch and pee at the same time before. But if the air was all right and they lasted for a while, something was going to have to be done with their waste. He didn’t like the idea of crawling through his own, much less anyone else’s. The floor was of concrete, but it had cracked wide open during the tremors; he recalled he’d felt a garden hoe in the debris that might be useful in digging a latrine.

And he was going to search the basement from one end to the other on his hands and knees, gathering up all the cans and everything else he could find. They obviously had plenty of food, and the cans would contain enough water and juices to keep them for a while. It was light he wanted more than anything else, and he’d never known how much he could miss electricity.

He crawled into a far corner to relieve himself. Going to be a long time before your next bath, he thought. Won’t be needing sunglasses anytime soon, either.

He winced. The urine burned like battery acid spewing out of him.

But I’m alive! he reassured himself. There might not be a whole hell of a lot to live for, but I’m alive. Tomorrow I may be dead, but today I’m alive and pissing on my knees.

And for the first time since the blast he allowed himself to dream that somehow-some way-he might live to see the outside world again.