Swan Song (30 page)

“I’m a gourmet,” she replied calmly. She figured the kid wasn’t going to let this crazy one-handed fucker hurt her, but her muscles were tensed for fight or flight. “What are you?”

“His name is Colonel James Macklin,” Roland told her. “He’s a war hero.”

“Looks to me like the war’s over. And we lost… hero,” she said, staring directly into Macklin’s eyes. “Take what you want, but I need my stash back.”

Macklin sized the young woman up, and he decided he might not be able to throw her to the ground and rape her, as he had intended until this instant. She might be too much to take with one hand, unless he wrestled her down and got the knife to her throat. He didn’t want to try and fail in front of Roland, though his penis had begun to pound. He grunted and dug for the hamburgers. When he found them, he flung the pack to Sheila, and she started gathering up the packets of coke and the pill bottles.

Macklin crawled over and pulled the shoes off Rudy’s feet; he worked a gold Rolex wristwatch from the corpse’s left wrist and put it on his own.

“How come you’re out here?” Sheila asked Roland, who was watching her pack the cocaine and pills away. “How come you’re not over there, closer to the light?”

“They don’t want dirtwarts,” Macklin replied. “That’s what they call us. Dirtwarts.” He nodded toward the rectangular hole a few feet away; it had been covered with a tarpaulin, impossible to detect in the darkness, and looked to Sheila to be about five feet deep. The corners of the tarp were held down with stones. “They don’t think we smell good enough to be any closer.” Macklin’s grin held madness. “How do you think I smell, lady?”

She thought he smelled like a hog in heat, but she shrugged and motioned toward a can of Right Guard deodorant that had fallen out of Rudy’s pack.

Macklin laughed. He was unbuckling Rudy’s belt in preparation to pull the trousers off. “See, we live out here on what we can get and what we can take. We wait for new ones to pass through on their way to the light.” He motioned with a nod of his head toward the lake shore. “Those people have the power: guns, plenty of canned food and bottled water, gas for their torches. Some of them even have tents. They roll around in that salt water, and we listen to them scream. They won’t let us near it. Oh, no! They think we’d pollute it or something.” He got Rudy’s trousers off and flung them into the pit. “See, the hell of all this is that the boy and I should be living in the light right now. We should be wearing clean clothes, and taking warm showers, and having all the food and water we want. Because we were prepared… we were ready! We knew the bombs were going to fall. Everybody in Earth House knew it!”

“Earth House? What’s that?”

“It’s where we came from,” Macklin said, crouching on the ground. “Up in the Idaho mountains. We walked a long way, and we saw a lot of death, and Roland figured that if we could get to the Great Salt Lake we could wash ourselves in it, clean all the radiation off, and the salt would heal us. That’s right, you know. Salt heals. Especially this.” He held up his bandaged stump; the blood-caked bandages were hanging down, and some of them had turned green. Sheila caught the reek of infected flesh. “I need to bathe it in that salt water, but they won’t let us any closer. They say that we live off the dead. So they shoot at us when we try to cross open ground. But now-now-we’ve got our own firepower!” He nodded toward the automatic Roland held.

“It’s a big lake,” Sheila said. “You don’t have to go through that encampment to get there. You could go around it.”

“No. Two reasons: somebody would move into our pit while we were gone and take everything we have; and second, nobody keeps Jimbo Macklin from what he wants.” He grinned at her, and she thought his face resembled a skull. “They don’t know who I am, or what I am. But I’m going to show them-oh, yes! I’m going to show all of them!” He turned his head toward the encampment, sat staring at the distant torches for a moment, then looked back at her. “You wouldn’t want to fuck, would you?”

She laughed. He was about the dirtiest, most repulsive thing she’d ever seen. But even as she laughed, she knew it was a mistake; she stopped her laugh in mid-note.

“Roland,” Macklin said quietly, “bring me the gun.”

Roland hesitated; he knew what was about to happen. Still, the King had delivered a command, and he was a King’s Knight and could not disobey. He took a step forward, hesitated again.

“Roland,” the King said.

This time Roland walked to him and delivered the pistol to his outstretched left hand. Macklin awkwardly gripped it and pointed it at Sheila’s head. Sheila lifted her chin defiantly, hooked the pack’s strap over her shoulder and stood up. “I’m going to start walking toward the camp,” she said. “Maybe you can shoot a woman in the back, war hero. I don’t think you can. So long, guys; it’s been fun.” She made herself step over Rudy’s corpse, then started walking purposefully through the junkyard, her heart pounding and her teeth gritted as she waited for the bullet.

Something moved off to her left. A figure in rags ducked down behind the wreckage of a Chevy station wagon. Something else scrambled across the dirt about twenty feet in front of her, and she realized she’d never make the camp alive.

“They’re waiting for you,” Roland called. “They’ll never let you get there.”

Sheila stopped. The torches seemed so far away, so terribly far. And even if she reached them without being raped-or worse-there was no certainty she wouldn’t be raped in the camp. She knew that without Rudy she was walking meat, drawing flies.

“Better come back,” Roland urged. “You’ll be safer with us.”

Safer, Sheila thought sarcastically. Sure. The last time she’d been safe was when she was in kindergarten. She’d run away from home at seventeen with the drummer in a rock band, had landed in Hollyweird and gone through phases of being a waitress, a topless dancer, a masseuse in a Sunset Strip parlor, had done a couple of porno flicks and then had latched up with Rudy. The world had become a crazy pinwheel of coke, poppers and faceless Johns, but the deep truth was that she enjoyed it. For her there was no whining of might-have-beens, no crawling on her knees for forgiveness; she liked danger, liked the dark side of the rock where the night things hid. Safety was boredom, and she’d always figured she could only live once, so why not blow it out?

Still, she didn’t think running the gauntlet of those crawling shapes would be too much fun.

Someone giggled, off in the darkness. It was a giggle of insane anticipation, and the sound of it put the lid on Sheila’s decision.

She turned around and walked back to where the kid and the one-handed war hero waited, and she was already figuring out how to get that pistol and blow both their heads off. The pistol would help her get to the torches at the edge of the lake.

“Get on your hands and knees,” Macklin commanded, his eyes glittering above his dirty beard.

Sheila smiled faintly and shrugged her pack off to the ground. What the hell? It would be no worse than some of the other Johns off the Strip. But she didn’t want to let him win so easily. “Be a sport, war hero,” she said, her hands on her hips. “Why don’t you let the kid go first?”

Macklin glanced at the boy, whose eyes behind the goggles looked like they were about to burst from his head. Sheila unbuckled her belt and started to peel the leopard-spotted pants off her hips, then her thighs, then over the cowboy boots. She wore no underwear. She got down on her hands and knees, opened the pack and took out a bottle of Black Beauties; she popped a pill down her throat and said “Come on, honey! It’s cold out there!”

Macklin suddenly laughed. He thought the woman had courage, and though he didn’t know what was to be done with her after they’d finished, he knew she was of his own kind. “Go ahead!” he told Roland. “Be a man!”

Roland was scared shitless. The woman was waiting, and the King wanted him to do it. He figured this was an important rite of manhood for a King’s Knight to pass through. His testicles were about to explode, and the dark mystery between the woman’s thighs drew him toward her like a hypnotic amulet.

Dirtwarts crawled closer to get a view of the festivities. Macklin sat watching, his eyes hooded and intense, and he stroked the automatic’s barrel back and forth beneath his chin.

He heard hollow laughter just over his left shoulder, and he knew the Shadow Soldier was enjoying this, too. The Shadow Soldier had come down from Blue Dome Mountain with them, had walked behind them and off to the side, but always there. The Shadow Soldier liked the boy; the Shadow Soldier thought the boy had a killer instinct that bore developing. Because the Shadow Soldier had told Macklin, in the silence of the dark, that his days of making war were not over yet. This new land was going to need warriors and warlords. Men like Macklin were going to be in demand again-as if they had ever gone out of demand. All this the Shadow Soldier told him, and Macklin believed.

He started laughing then, too, at the sight in front of him, and his laughter and that of the Shadow Soldier intertwined, merged, and became as one.

Thirty-Five - [Hell Freezes]

Over two thousand miles away, Sister sat next to the hearth. Everyone else was asleep on the floor around the room, and it was Sister’s night to watch over the fire, to keep it banked and the embers glowing so they wouldn’t have to waste matches. The space heater had been turned low to save their dwindling supply of kerosene, and cold had begun to sneak through chinks in the walls.

Mona Ramsey muttered in her sleep, and her husband shifted his position and put his arm around her. The old man was dead to the world, Artie lay on a bed of newspapers, and every so often Steve Buchanan snored like a chainsaw. But Sister was disturbed by the wheeze of Artie’s breathing. She’d noticed him holding his ribs, but he’d said he was okay, that he was sometimes short of breath but otherwise feeling, as he put it, “as smooth as pickles and cream.”

She hoped so, because if Artie was hurt somewhere inside-maybe when that damned wolf had slammed into him on the highway about ten days ago-there was no medicine to stave off infection.

The duffel bag was beside her. She loosened the drawstring and reached inside, found the glass ring and drew it out into the emberglow.

Its brilliance filled the room. The last time she’d peered into the glass circle, during her firewatch duty four nights before, she’d gone dreamwalking again. One second she was sitting right there, holding the circle just as she was doing now, and the next she’d found herself standing over a table-a square table, with what appeared to be cards arranged on its surface.

The cards were decorated with pictures, and they were unlike any cards Sister had ever seen before. One of them in particular caught her attention: the figure of a skeleton on a rearing skeletal horse, swinging a scythe through what seemed to be a grotesque field of human bodies. She thought there were shadows in the room, other presences, the muffled voices of people speaking. And she thought, as well, that she heard someone coughing, but the sound was distorted, as if heard through a long, echoing tunnel-and when she came back to the cabin she realized it was Artie coughing and holding his ribs.

She’d thought often of that card with the scythe-swinging skeleton. She could still see it, lodged behind her eyes. She thought also of the shadows that had seemed to be in the room with her-insubstantial things, but maybe that was because all her attention had been focused on the cards. Maybe, if she’d concentrated on giving form to the shadows, she might have seen who was standing there.

Right, she thought. You’re acting like you really go somewhere when you see pictures in the glass circle! And that’s only what they were, of course. Pictures. Fantasy. Imagination. Whatever. There was nothing real about them at all!

But she did know that dreamwalking, and coming back from dreamwalking, was getting easier. Not every time she peered into the glass was a dreamwalk, though; most often it was just an object of fiery light, no dream pictures at all. Still, the glass ring held an unknown power; of that she was certain. If it wasn’t something with a powerful purpose, why had the Doyle Halland-thing wanted it?

Whatever it was, she had to protect it. She was responsible for its safety, and she could not-she dared not-lose it.

“Jesus in suspenders! What’s that?”

Startled, Sister looked up. Paul Thorson, his eyes swollen from sleep, had come through the green curtain. He pushed back his unruly hair and stood, open-mouthed, as the ring pulsed in rhythm with Sister’s heartbeat.

She almost shoved it back into the duffel bag, but it was too late.

“That thing’s… on fire!” he managed to say. “What is it?”

“I’m not sure yet. I found it in Manhattan.”

“My God! The colors…” He knelt down beside her, obviously overwhelmed. A flaming circle of light was about the last thing he’d expected to find when he’d stumbled in to warm himself by the embers. “What makes it pulse like that?”

“It’s picking up my heartbeat. It does that when you hold it.”

“What is it, some kind of Japanese thing? Does it run on batteries?”

Sister smiled wryly. “I don’t think so.”

Paul reached out and poked it with a finger. He blinked. “It’s glass!”

“That’s right.”

“Wow,” he whispered. Then: “Would it be okay if I held it? Just for a second?”

She was about to answer yes, but Doyle Halland’s promise stopped her. That monster could make itself look like anyone; any of the people in this room could be the Doyle Halland-thing, even Paul himself. But no; they’d left the monster behind them, hadn’t they? How did such a creature travel? “I followed the line of least resistance,” she recalled him saying. If he wore human skin, then he traveled as a human, too. She shuddered, imagining him walking after them in a pair of dead man’s shoes, walking day and night without a rest until the shoes flayed right off his feet, and then he stopped to yank another pair off a corpse because he could make any size fit…

“Can I?” Paul urged.

Where was Doyle Halland? Sister wondered. Out there in the dark right now, passing by on I-80? Up ahead a mile or two, running down another pair of shoes? Could he fly in the wind, with black cats on his shoulders and his eyes filled with flame, or was he a tattered highway hiker who looked for campfires burning in the night?

He was behind them. Wasn’t he?

Sister took a deep breath and offered the glass ring to Paul. He slid his hand around it.

The light remained constant. The half that Paul held took on a new, quickened rhythm. He drew it to himself with both hands, and Sister let her breath out.

“Tell me about this,” he said. “I want to know.”

Sister saw the gems reflected in his eyes. On his face was a childlike amazement, as if the years were peeling rapidly away. In another few seconds he appeared a decade younger than his forty-three years. She decided then to tell him all of it.

He was quiet for a long time when she’d finished. The ring’s pulsing had speeded up and slowed down all through the telling. “Tarot cards,” Paul said, still admiring the ring. “The skeleton with the scythe stands for Death.” With an effort, he looked up at her. “You know all that sounds crazy as hell, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do. Here’s the scar where the crucifix was torn off. Artie saw the thing’s face change, too, though I doubt he’ll admit it to you. He hasn’t mentioned it since it happened, and I guess that’s for the best. And here’s the glass circle, missing one spike.”

“Uh-huh. You haven’t been slipping into my Johnny Walker, have you?”

“You know better. I know I see things when I look into the glass. Not every time, but enough to tell me I’ve either got a hummer of an imagination or-”

“Or what?”

“Or,” Sister continued, “there’s a reason for me to have it. Why should I see a Cookie Monster doll lying in the middle of a desert? Or a hand coming out of a hole? Why should I see a table with tarot cards on it? Hell, I don’t even know what the damned things are!”

“They’re used to tell the future by gypsies. Or witches.” He summoned a half smile that made him almost handsome. It faded when she didn’t return it. “Listen, I don’t know anything about demons with roaming eyeballs or dream-walking, but I do know this is one hell of a piece of glass. A couple of months ago, this thing would’ve been worth-” He shook his head. “Wow,” he said again. “The only reason you’ve got it is that you were in the right place at the right time. That’s magic enough, isn’t it?”

“But you don’t believe what I’ve told you, right?”

“I want to say the radiation’s unscrewed your bolts. Or maybe the nukes blew the lid right off Hell itself, and who can say what slithered out?” He returned the ring to her, and she put it back in the bag. “You take care of that. It may be the only beautiful thing left.”

Across the room, Artie winced and sucked in his breath when he changed position, then lay still again.

“He’s hurt inside,” Paul told her. “I’ve seen blood in his crap bucket. I figure he’s got a splintered rib or two, probably cutting something.” He worked his fingers, feeling the warmth of the glass circle in them. “I don’t think he looks too good.”

“I know. I’m afraid whatever’s wrong may be infected.”

“It’s possible. Shit, with these living conditions you could die from biting your fingernails.”

“And there’s no medicine?”

“Sorry. I popped the last Tylenol about three days before the bombs hit. A poem I was writing fell to pieces.”

“So what are we going to do when the kerosene runs out?”

Paul grunted. He’d been expecting that question, and he’d known no one would ask it but her. “We’ve got another week’s supply. Maybe. I’m more worried about the batteries for the radio. When they’re dead, these folks are going to freak. I guess then we’ll get out the scotch and have a party.” His eyes were old again. “Just play spin the bottle, and whoever gets lucky can check out first.”

“Check out? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’ve got a.357 Magnum in that footlocker, lady,” he reminded her. “And a box of bullets. I’ve come close to using it on myself twice: once when my second wife left me for a kid half my age, took all my money and said my cock wasn’t worth two cents in a depression, and the other time when the poems I’d been working on for six years burned up along with the rest of my apartment. That was just after I got kicked off the staff at Millersville State College for sleeping with a student who wanted an A on her English Lit final.” He continued working his knuckles, avoiding Sister’s stare. “I’m not what you’d call a real good-luck type of guy. As a matter of fact, just about everything I’ve ever tried to do turned into a shitcake. So that Magnum’s been waiting for me for a long time. I’m overdue.”

Sister was shocked by Paul’s matter-of-factness; he talked about suicide like the next step in a natural progression. “My friend,” she said firmly, “if you think I’ve come all this way to blow my brains out in a shack, you’re as crazy as I used to-” She bit her tongue. Now he was watching her with heightened interest.

“So what are you going to do, then? Where are you going to go? Down to the supermarket for a few steaks and a six-pack? How about a hospital to keep Artie from bleeding to death inside? In case you haven’t noticed, there’s not much left out there.”

“Well, I never would’ve taken you for a coward. I thought you had guts, but it must’ve been just sawdust stuffing.”

“Couldn’t have said it better myself.”

“What if they want to live?” Sister motioned toward the sleeping figures. “They look up to you. They’ll do what you tell them. So you’re going to tell them to check out?”

“They can decide for themselves. But like I say, where are they going to go?”

“Out there,” she said, and she nodded at the door. “Into the world-what’s left of it, at least. You don’t know what’s five or ten miles down the highway. There might be a Civil Defense shelter, or a whole community of people. The only way to find out is to get in your pick-up truck and drive west on I-80.”

“I didn’t like the world as it used to be. I sure as hell don’t like it now.”

“Who asked you to like it? Listen, don’t jive me. You need people more than you want to believe.”

“Sure,” he said sarcastically. “Love ’em, every one.”

“If you don’t need people,” Sister challenged, “why’d you go up to the highway? Not to kill wolves. You can do that from the front door. You went up to the highway looking for people, didn’t you?”

“Maybe I wanted a captive audience for my poetry readings.”

“Uh-huh. Well, when the kerosene’s gone, I’m heading west. Artie’s going with me.”

“The wolves’ll like that, lady. They’ll be happy to escort you.”

“I’m also taking your rifle,” she said. “And the rifle bullets.”

“Thanks for asking my permission.”

She shrugged. “All you need is the Magnum. I doubt if you’ll have to worry much about the wolves after you’re dead. I’d like to take the pick-up truck, too.”

Paul laughed without mirth. “In case you’ve forgotten, I told you it doesn’t have much gas, and the brakes are screwed up. The radiator’s probably frozen solid by now, and I doubt if there’s a gasp in the battery.”

Sister had never met anybody so full of reasons to sit on his ass and rot. “Have you tried the truck lately? Even if the radiator’s frozen, we can light a fire under the damned thing!”

“You’ve got it all figured out, huh? Going to make it to the highway in a broken-down old truck and right around the bend will be a shining city full of Civil Defense people, doctors and policemen doing their best to put this fine country back together again. Bet you’ll find all the king’s horses and all the king’s men there, too! Lady, I know what’s around the bend! More fucking highway, that’s what!” He was working his knuckles harder, a bitter smile flickering at the edges of his mouth. “I wish you luck, lady. I really do.”

“I don’t want to wish you luck,” she told him. “I want you to come with me.”

He was silent. His knuckles cracked. “If there’s anything left out there,” he said, “it’s going to be worse than Dodge City, Dante’s Inferno, the Dark Ages and No Man’s Land all rolled up in one. You’re going to see things that’ll make your demon with the roaming eyeballs look like one of the Seven Dwarves.”

“You like to play poker, but you’re not much of a gambler, are you?”