Swan Song (29 page)

“Yes,” Swan breathed. “Oh… yes.”

“Sit down right there, child”-Leona touched one of the chairs-“and let’s see what we can see. All right?”

Swan wavered, still uncertain, but she was entranced by the beautiful, mysterious figures on those magic cards. She looked up into Leona Skelton’s face, and then she slid into the chair as if it had been made for her.

Leona took the chair across from her and moved the lamp toward her right. “We’re going to do something called the Grand Cross. That’s a fancy way to arrange the cards so they’ll tell a story. It might not be a clear story; it might not be an easy story, but the cards’ll lock together, one upon the next, kinda like that jigsaw puzzle we were talkin’ about. You ready?”

Swan nodded, her heart beginning to thump. The wind hooted and wailed outside, and for an instant Swan thought she did hear a dark voice in it.

Leona smiled and rummaged through the cards, looking for a particular one. She found it and held it up for Swan to see. “This one’ll stand for you, and the other cards’ll build a story around it.” She placed the card down on the table in front of Swan; it was trimmed in gold and red and bore the picture of a youth in a long gold cape and a cap with a red feather, holding a stick before him with green vines curled around it. “That’s the Page of Rods-a child, with a long way yet to go.” She pushed the rest of the deck toward Swan. “Can you shuffle those?”

Swan didn’t know how to shuffle cards, and she shook her head.

“Well, just scramble ’em, then. Scramble ’em real good, around and around, and while you’re doin’ that you think real hard about where you’ve been, and who you are, and where you’re wantin’ to go.”

Swan did as she asked, and the cards slipped around in all directions, their faces pressed to the table and just their golden backs showing. She concentrated on the things that Leona had mentioned, thought as hard as she could, though the noise of the wind kept trying to distract her, and finally Leona said, “That’s good, child. Now put ’em together into a deck again, face down, in any order you please. Then cut the deck into three piles and put ’em on your left.”

When that was done, Leona reached out, her hand graceful in the muted orange light, and picked up each pile to form a deck once more. “Now we start the story,” she said.

She placed the first card face up, directly over the Page of Rods. “This covers you,” she said. It was a large golden wheel, with figures of men and women as the spokes in it, some with joyous expressions at the top of the wheel and others, on the wheel’s bottom, holding their hands to their faces in despair. “The Wheel of Fortune-ever turnin’, bringin’ change and unfoldin’ Fate. That’s the atmosphere you’re in, maybe things movin’ and turnin’ around you that you don’t even know about yet.”

The next card was laid across the Wheel of Fortune. “This crosses you,” Leona said, “and stands for the forces that oppose you.” Her eyes narrowed. “Oh, Lordy.” The card, trimmed in ebony and silver, showed a figure shrouded almost entirely in a black cloak and cowl except for a white, masklike and grinning face; its eyes were silver-but there was a third eye of scarlet in its forehead. At the top of the card was scrolled, intricate lettering that read-

“The Devil,” Leona said. “Destruction unleashed. Inhumanity. You have to be on guard and watch yourself, child.”

Before Swan could ask about that card, which gave her a shiver, Leona dealt the next one out, above the other two. “This crowns you, and says what you yearn for. The Ace of Cups-peace, beauty, a yearning for understanding.”

“Aw, that’s not me!” Swan said, embarrassed.

“Maybe not yet. But maybe someday.” The next card was laid below the hateful-looking Devil. “This is beneath you, and tells a story about what you’ve been through to get where you are.” The card showed the brilliant yellow sun, but it was turned upside down. “The Sun like that stands for loneliness, uncertainty… the loss of someone. Maybe the loss of part of yourself, too. The death of innocence.” Leona glanced up quickly and then back to the cards. The next card, the fifth that Leona had dealt from the scrambled pack, was placed to the left of the Devil card. “This is behind you, an influence passin’ away.” It was the old man carrying a star in a lantern, but this one was upside down, too. “The Hermit. Turned upside down, it means withdrawal, hidin’, forgettin’ your responsibilities. All those things are passin’ away. You’re goin’ out into the world-for better or worse.”

The sixth card went to the right of the Devil. “This is before you, and says what will come.”

Leona examined the card with interest. This one showed a youth in crimson armor, holding an upraised sword while a castle blazed in the background. “The Page of Swords,” Leona explained. “A young girl or boy who craves power. Who lives for it, needs it like food and water. The Devil’s lookin’ in that direction, too. Could be there’s some kinda link between ’em. Anyway, that’s somebody you might run up against-somebody real crafty-and maybe dangerous, too.”

Before she could turn the next card over, a voice drifted through the hallways: “Leona! Leona!” Davy began coughing violently, almost choking, and instantly she put the cards aside and rushed out of the room.

Swan stood up. The Devil card-a man with a scarlet eye, she thought-seemed to be staring right at her, and she felt goose bumps come up on her arms. The deck that Leona had put aside was only a few inches away, its top card beckoning her to take a peek.

Her hand drifted toward it. Stopped.

Just a peek. A small, itty-bitty peek.

She picked up the top card and looked.

It showed a beautiful woman in violet robes, the sun shining above her, and around her a sheaf of wheat, a waterfall and flowers. At her feet lay a lion and a lamb. But her hair was afire, and her eyes were fiery too, determined and set on some distant obstacle. She carried a silver shield with a design of fire at its center, and on her head was a crown that burned with colors like trapped stars. Ornate lettering at the top of the card said THE EMPRESS.

Swan allowed herself to linger over it until all the details were impressed in her mind. She put it down, and the deck’s next card pulled at her. No! she warned herself. You’ve gone far enough! She could almost feel the Devil’s baleful scarlet eye, mocking her to lift one more card.

She picked up the following card. Turned it over.

She went cold.

A skeleton in armor sat astride a rearing horse of bones, and in the skeleton’s arms was a blood-smeared scythe. The thing was reaping a wheat field, but the sheaves of wheat were made up of human bodies lashed together, nude and writhing in agony as they were slashed by the flailing scythe. The sky was the color of blood, and in it black crows circled over the human field of misery. It was the most terrible picture Swan had ever seen, and she did not have to read the lettering at the top of this card to recognize what it was.

“What are you up to in here?”

The voice almost made her jump three feet in the air. She whirled around, and there was Josh standing in the doorway. His face, splotched with gray and white pigment and brown crusted burns, was grotesque, but Swan realized in that instant that she loved it-and him. He looked around the room, frowning. “What’s all this?”

“It’s… Leona’s seeing room. She was reading my future in the cards.”

Josh walked in and took a look at the cards laid out on the table. “Those are real pretty,” he said. “All except that one.” He tapped the Devil card. “That reminds me of a nightmare I had after I ate a salami sandwich and a whole box of chocolate doughnuts.”

Still unnerved, Swan showed him the last card she’d picked up.

He took it between his fingers and held it nearer the light. He’d seen tarot cards before, in the French Quarter in New Orleans. The lettering spelled out DEATH.

Death reaping the human race, he thought. It was one of the grimmest things he’d ever seen, and in the tricky light the silver scythe seemed to slash back and forth through the human sheaves, the skeletal horse rearing while its rider labored under the blood-red sky. He flipped it back onto the table, and it slid halfway across the card with the demonic, scarlet-eyed figure on it. “Just cards,” he said. “Paper and paints. They don’t mean anything.”

“Leona said they tell a story.”

Josh gathered the cards into a deck again, getting the Devil and Death out of Swan’s sight. “Paper and paints,” he repeated. “That’s all.”

They couldn’t help but hear Davy Skelton’s gasping, tormented coughing. Seeing those cards, especially the one with the grim reaper, had given Josh a creepy feeling. Davy sounded as if he were strangling, and they heard Leona crooning to him, trying to calm him down. Death’s near, Josh knew suddenly. It’s very, very near. He walked out of the seeing room and down the hall. The door to Davy’s room was ajar. Josh figured he might be able to help, and he started into the sickroom.

He saw first that the sheets were splotched with blood. A man’s agonized face was illuminated by yellow lamplight, eyes dazed with sickness and horror, and from his mouth as he coughed came gouts of thick, dark gore.

Josh stopped in the doorway.

Leona was leaning over her husband, a porcelain bowl in her lap and a blood-damp rag in her hand. She sensed Josh’s presence, turned her head and said with as much dignity as she could muster, “Please. Go out and close the door.”

Josh hesitated, stunned and sick.

“Please,” Leona implored, as her husband coughed his life out in her lap.

He backed out of the room and pulled the door shut.

Somehow he found himself sitting before the fireplace again. He smelled himself. He stank, and he needed to get some buckets of water from the well, heat them in the fire and immerse himself in that bath he’d been looking forward to. But the yellow, strained face of the dying man in the other room was in his mind and would not let him move; he remembered Darleen, dying in the dirt. Remembered the corpse that lay out there on somebody’s porch steps in the moaning dark. The image of that skeletal rider running riot through the wheat field of humanity was leeched in his brain.

Oh God, he thought as the tears started to come. Oh, God, help us all.

And then he bowed his head and sobbed-not just for his memories of Rose and the boys, but for Davy Skelton and Darleen Prescott and the dead person out in the dark and all the dead and dying human beings who’d once felt the sun on their faces and thought they’d live forever. He sobbed, the tears rolling down his face and dropping from his chin, and he could not stop.

Someone put an arm around his neck.

The child.

Swan.

Josh pulled her to him, and this time she clung to him while he cried.

She held tight. She loved Josh, and she couldn’t bear to hear his hurting sound.

The wind shrieked, changed direction, attacked the ruins of Sullivan from another angle.

And in that wind she thought she heard a dark voice whispering, “All mine… all mine.”

Hell Freezes

Dirtwarts /

The Waiting Magnum /

Zulu Warrior /

The Elemental Fist /

Dealing with the Fat Man /

Paradise /

The Sound of Somebody Being Reborn/

Thirty-Four - [Hell Freezes]

Torches whipped in the cold wind on the desert flatland thirty miles northwest of Salt Lake City’s crater. Some three hundred ragged, half-starved people huddled on the shore of the Great Salt Lake, in a makeshift city of cardboard boxes, broken-down automobiles, tents and trailers. The torchlight carried for miles over the flat terrain and drew scattered bands of survivors who were struggling eastward from the ruined cities and towns of California and Nevada. Every day and night groups of people, their belongings strapped to their backs, carried in their arms, lugged in suitcases or pushed in wheelbarrows and grocery carts, came into the encampment and found a space of hard, bare earth to crouch on. The more fortunate ones came with tents and knapsacks of canned food and bottled water and had guns to protect their supplies; the weakest ones curled up and expired when their food and water was either used up or stolen-and the bodies of suicides floated in the Great Salt Lake like grim, bobbing logs. But the smell of the salt water in the wind drew bands of wanderers as well; those without fresh water tried to drink it, and those suffering from festered wounds and burns sought its cleansing, agonizing embrace with the single-minded desire of religious flagellants.

At the western edge of the encampment, on rough and rock-stubbled ground, over a hundred corpses lay where they’d collapsed. The bodies had been stripped naked by scavengers, who lived in pits in the dirt and were contemptuously called “dirtwarts” by the people who lived closest to the lake shore. Strewn out almost to the western horizon was a junkyard of cars, RVs, campers, Jeeps and motorcycles that had run out of gas or whose engines had locked for want of oil. The scavengers scrambled out, tore the seats out of cars, took the tires off, ripped the doors and hoods and trunks away to make their own bizarre dwellings. Gas tanks were drained by parties of armed men from the main encampment, the gas set aside to fuel the torches-because light had become strength, an almost mystic protection against the horrors of the dark.

Two figures, both laden with backpacks, trudged across the desert toward the light of the torches, about a half mile ahead. It was the night of August twenty-third, one month and six days after the bombs. The two figures walked through the junkyard of vehicles, not hesitating as they stepped on the occasional nude corpse. Over the odors of corruption they could smell the salt lake. Their own car, a BMW stolen from a lot in the ghost town of Carson City, Nevada, had run out of gas about twelve miles back, and they’d been walking all night, following the glow of the lights reflected off low-lying clouds.

Something rattled off to the side, behind the scavenged wreck of a Dodge Charger. The figure in the lead stopped and drew a.45 automatic from a shoulder holster under a blue goosedown parka. The sound did not repeat itself, and after a silent moment the two figures began to walk toward the encampment again, their pace faster.

The lead figure had taken about five more steps when a hand burst from the loose dirt and sand at his feet and grabbed his left ankle, jerking him off balance. His shout of alarm and the.45 went off together, but the gun fired toward the sky. He hit hard on his left side, the air whooshing from his lungs with the shock, and a human shape scrabbled like a crab from a pit that had opened in the earth. The crab-thing fell upon the man with the knapsack, planted a knee in his throat and began to batter his face with a left-hand fist.

The second figure screamed-a woman’s scream-then turned and started running through the junkyard. She heard footsteps behind her, sensing something gaining on her, and as she turned her head to look back she tripped over one of the naked corpses and went down on her face. She tried to scramble up, but suddenly a sneakered foot pressed on the back of her head, forcing her nostrils and mouth into the dirt. Her body thrashing, she began to suffocate.

A few yards away, the crab-thing shifted, using the left knee to pin the young man’s gun hand to the ground, the right knee pressed into his chest. The young man was gasping for air, his eyes wide and stunned over a dirty blond beard. And then the crab-thing drew with its left hand a hunting knife from a leather sheath under a long, dusty black overcoat; the hunting knife slashed fast and deep across the young man’s throat-once, again, a third time. The young man stopped struggling and his lips pulled back from his teeth in a grimace.

The woman fought for life; she got her head turned, her cheek mashed into the ground, and she begged, “Please… don’t kill me! I’ll give you… give you what you want! Please don’t…”

The sneakered foot suddenly drew back. The point of what felt like an ice pick pricked her cheek just below her right eye.

“No tricks.” It was a boy’s voice, high and reedy. “Understand?” The ice pick jabbed for emphasis.

“Yes,” she answered. The boy grabbed a handful of her long, raven-black hair and pulled her up to a sitting position. She was able to make out his face in the dim wash of the distant lights. He was just a kid, maybe thirteen or fourteen years old, wearing an oversized, filthy brown sweater and gray trousers with holes where the knees had been; he was skinny to the point of emaciation, his high-cheekboned face pale and cadaverous. His dark hair was plastered to his skull with grime and sweat, and he wore a pair of goggles-the kind of goggles, trimmed in battered leather, that she figured World War II fighter pilots might have worn. The lens magnified his eyes as if through fishbowls. “Don’t hurt me, okay? I swear I won’t scream.”

Roland Croninger laughed. That was about the stupidest fucking thing he’d ever heard. “You can scream if you want to. Nobody gives a shit whether you scream or not. Take the pack off.”

“You got him?” Colonel Macklin called, from where he crouched atop the other body.

“Yes, sir,” Roland answered. “It’s a woman.”

“Bring her over here!”

Roland picked up the pack and stepped backward. “Start moving.” She started to rise, but he shoved her down again. “No. Not on your feet. Crawl.”

She started crawling through the dirt, over the festering bodies. A scream was locked behind her teeth, but she didn’t let it get loose. “Rudy?” she called weakly. “Rudy? You okay?”

And then she saw the figure in the black coat ripping open Rudy’s backpack, and she saw all the blood, and she knew they’d stepped into deep shit.

Roland tossed the other pack over to Colonel Macklin, then put his ice pick away in the elastic waistband of the trousers he’d stripped from the corpse of a boy about his age and size. He pried the automatic out of Rudy’s dead fingers as the woman sat nearby, numbly watching.

“Good gun,” he told the King. “We can use it.”

“Got to have more clips,” Macklin answered, digging through the pack with one hand. He pulled out socks, underwear, toothpaste, an army surplus mess kit-and a canteen that sloshed when he shook it. “Water!” he said. “Oh, Jesus-it’s fresh water!” He got the canteen between his thighs and unscrewed the cap, then took several swigs of sweet, delicious water; it ran down through the gray-swirled stubble of his new beard and dripped to the ground.

“You got a canteen, too?” Roland asked her.

She nodded, pulling the canteen strap from her shoulder under the ermine coat she’d taken from a Carson City boutique. She was wearing leopard-spotted designer jeans and expensive boots, and around her neck were ropes of pearls and diamond chains.

“Give it here.”

She looked into his face and drew her back up straight. He was just a punk, and she knew how to handle punks. “Fuck you,” she told him, and she uncapped it and started drinking, her hard blue eyes challenging him over the canteen’s rim.

“Hey!” someone called from the darkness; the voice was hoarse, scabrous-sounding. “You catch a woman over there?”

Roland didn’t answer. He watched the woman’s silken throat working as she drank.

“I’ve got a bottle of whiskey!” the voice continued. “I’ll trade you!”

She stopped drinking. The Perrier suddenly tasted foul.

“A bottle of whiskey for thirty minutes!” the voice said. “I’ll give her back to you when I’m through! Deal?”

“I’ve got a carton of cigarettes!” another man called, from off to the left beyond an overturned Jeep. “Fifteen minutes for a carton of cigarettes!”

She hurriedly capped the canteen and threw it at the kid’s sneakered feet. “Here,” she said, keeping her eyes fixed on his. “You can have it all.”

“Ammo clips!” Macklin exclaimed, pulling three of them out of Rudy’s pack. “We’ve got ourselves some firepower!”

Roland opened the canteen, took a few swallows of water, recapped it and slid the strap over his shoulder. From all around them drifted the voices of other dirtwarts, offering caches of liquor, cigarettes, matches, candy bars and other valuables for time with the newly snared woman. Roland remained quiet, listening to the rising bids with the pleasure of an auctioneer who knows he has a prize of real worth. He studied the woman through the eyeglass-goggles he’d made for himself, gluing the appropriate-strength lenses-found in the wreckage of a Pocatello optometry shop-into army surplus tank commander goggles. She was unmarked except for several small, healing gashes on her cheeks and forehead-and that alone made her a very special prize. Most of the women in the encampment had lost their hair and eyebrows and were marked with keloid scars of various colors, from dark brown to scarlet. This woman’s black hair cascaded around her shoulders; it was dirty, but there were no bald patches in it-the first signs of radiation poisoning. She had a strong, square-chinned face; a haughty face, Roland thought. The face of roughneck royalty. Her electric-blue eyes moved slowly from the gun to Rudy’s corpse and back to Roland’s face, as if she were figuring the precise points of a triangle. Roland thought she might be in her late twenties or early thirties, and his eyes slid down to the mounds of her breasts, swelling a red T-shirt with RICH BITCH stenciled across it in rhinestones underneath the ermine coat. He thought he detected her nipples sticking out, as if the danger and death had revved her sexual engine.

He felt a pressure in his stomach, and he quickly lifted his gaze from her nipples. He had suddenly wondered what one of them might feel like between his teeth.

Her full-lipped mouth parted. “Do you like what you see?”

“A flashlight!” one of the dirtwarts offered. “I’ll give you a flashlight for her!”

Roland didn’t respond. This woman made him think of the pictures in the magazines he’d found in the bottom drawer of his father’s dresser, back in his other, long-ago life. His belly was tightening, and there was a pounding in his nuts as if they were being squeezed by a brutal fist. “What’s your name?”

“Sheila,” she answered. “Sheila Fontana. What’s yours?” She had determined, with the cold logic of a born survivor, that her chances were better here, with this punk kid and the man with one hand, than out in the dark with those other things. The one-handed man cursed and dumped the rest of Rudy’s pack on the ground.

“Roland Croninger.”

“Roland,” she repeated, making it sound like she was licking a lollipop. “You’re not going to give me to them, are you, Roland?”

“Was he your husband?” Roland prodded Rudy’s body with his foot.

“No. We traveled together, that’s all.” Actually, they had lived together for almost a year, and he’d done some pimping for her back in Oakland, but there was no need to confuse the kid. She looked at Rudy’s bloody throat and then quickly away; she felt a pang of regret, because he had been a good business manager, a fantastic lover, and he’d kept them supplied with plenty of blow. But he was just dead meat now, and that was how the world turned. As Rudy himself would’ve said, you cover your own ass, at all and any cost.

Something moved on the ground behind Sheila, and she turned to look. A vaguely human shape was crawling toward her. It stopped about seven or eight feet away, and a hand covered with open, running sores lifted a paper bag. “Candy barsssss?” a mangled voice offered.

Roland fired the automatic, and the noise of the shot made Sheila jump. The thing on the ground grunted and then made a sound like a yelping dog; it scrambled to its knees and scurried away amid the junked vehicles.

Sheila knew the kid wasn’t going to turn her over to them, after all. Hoarse, garbled laughter came from other, hidden pits in the dirt. Sheila had seen plenty of Hell since she and Rudy had left a coke dealer’s cabin in the Sierras, where they’d been hiding from the San Francisco cops when the bombs had hit, but this was by far the worst. She looked down into the kid’s goggled eyes, because her height approached six feet; she was as big-boned as an Amazon warrior, but all curves and compliance when it met her needs, and she knew he was hooked through the cock.

“What the hell is this shit?” Macklin said, leaning over the items he’d pulled out of Sheila’s backpack.

Sheila knew what the one-handed man had found. She approached him, disregarding the kid’s.45, and saw what he was holding: a plastic bag full of snow-white, extra-fine Colombian sugar. Scattered around him were three more plastic bags of high-grade cocaine, and about a dozen plastic bottles of poppers, Black Beauties, Yellowjackets, Bombers, Red Ladies, PCP and LSD tabs. “That’s my medicine bag, friend,” she told him. “If you’re looking for food, I’ve got a couple of old Whoppers and some fries in there, too. You’re welcome to it, but I want my stash back.”

“Drugs,” Macklin realized. “What is this? Cocaine?” He dropped the bag and picked up one of the bottles, lifting his filthy, blood-splattered face toward her. His crewcut was growing out, the dark brown hair peppered with gray. His eyes were deep holes carved in a rocklike face. “Pills, too? What are you, an addict?”