Swan Song (46 page)

Fifty - [Toadfrog With Golden

Wings]

A battered Jeep with one good headlight emerged from the snow on Missouri Highway 63 and entered what had once been a town. Lanterns glowed within a few of the clapboard houses, but otherwise darkness ruled the streets.

“Stop there.” Sister motioned toward a brick structure on the right. The building’s windows were boarded up, but crowded around it in the gravel parking lot were several old cars and pickup trucks. As Paul Thorson guided the Jeep into the lot the single headlight washed over a sign painted in red on one of the boarded windows: Bucket of Blood Tavern.

“Uh… you sure you want to stop at this particular place?” Paul inquired.

She nodded, her head cowled by the hood of a dark blue parka. “Where there’re cars, somebody ought to know where to find gas.” She glanced at the fuel gauge. The needle hovered near Empty. “Maybe we can find out where the hell we are, too.”

Paul turned off the heater, then the single headlight and the engine. He was wearing his old reliable leather jacket over a red woolen sweater, with a scarf around his neck and a brown woolen cap pulled over his skull. His beard was ashen-gray, as was much of his hair, but his eyes were still a powerful, undimmed electric blue against the heavily lined, windburned skin of his face. He glanced uneasily at the sign on the boards and climbed out of the Jeep. Sister reached into the rear compartment, where an assortment of canvas bags, cardboard boxes and crates were secured with a chain and padlock. Right behind her seat was a beat-up brown leather satchel, which she picked up with one gloved hand and took with her.

From beyond the door came the noise of off-key piano music and a burst of raucous male laughter. Paul braced himself and pushed it open, walking in with Sister at his heels. The door, fixed to the wall with tight springs, snapped shut behind them.

Instantly, the music and laughter ceased. Suspicious eyes glared at the new arrivals.

At the room’s center, next to a free-standing cast-iron stove, six men had been playing cards around a table. A haze of yellow smoke from hand-rolled cigarettes hung in the air, diffusing the light of several lanterns that dangled from wall hooks. Other tables were occupied by two or three men and some rough-looking women. A bartender in a fringed leather jacket stood behind a long bar that Paul noted was pocked with bullet holes. Blazing logs popped red sparks from a fireplace in the rear wall, and at the piano sat a chunky young woman with long black hair and a violet keloid that covered the lower half of her face and exposed throat.

Both Sister and Paul had seen that most of the men wore guns in holsters at their waists and had rifles propped against their chairs.

The floor was an inch deep in sawdust, and the tavern smelled of unwashed bodies. There was a sharp ping! as one of the men at the center table spat tobacco juice into a pail.

“We’re lost,” Paul said. “What town is this?”

A man laughed. He had greasy black hair and was wearing what looked like a dogskin coat. He blew smoke into the air from a brown cigarette. “What town you tryin’ to get to, fella?”

“We’re just traveling. Is this place on the map?”

The men exchanged amused glances, and now the laughter spread. “What map do you mean?” the one with greasy hair asked. “Drawn up before the seventeenth of July, or after?”

“Before.”

“The before maps ain’t no fuckin’ good,” another man said. He had a bony face and was shaved almost bald. Four fishhooks dangled from his left earlobe, and he wore a leather vest over a red-checked shirt. At his skinny waist were a holster and pistol. “Everything’s changed. Towns are graveyards. Rivers flooded over, changed course and froze. Lakes dried up. What was woods is desert. So the before maps ain’t no fuckin’ good.”

Paul was aware of all that. After seven years of traveling a zigzag path across a dozen states, there was very little that shocked him or Sister anymore. “Did this town ever have a name?”

“Moberly,” the bartender offered. “Moberly, Missouri. Used to be about fifteen thousand people here. Now I guess we’re down to three or four hundred.”

“Yeah, but it ain’t the nukes that killed ’em!” a wizened woman with red hair and red lips spoke up from another table. “It’s the rotgut shit you serve in here, Derwin!” She cackled and raised a mug of oily-looking liquid to her lips while the others laughed and hooted.

“Aw, fuck you, Lizzie!” Derwin shot back. “Your gut’s been pickled since you was ten years old!”

Sister walked to an empty table and set her satchel atop it. Beneath the hood of her parka, most of her face was covered by a dark gray scarf. Unsnapping the satchel, she removed the tattered, folded and refolded Rand McNally road atlas, which she smoothed out and opened to the map of Missouri. In the dim light, she found the thin red line of Highway 63 and followed it to a dot named Moberly, about seventy-five miles north of what had been Jefferson City. “Here we are,” she told Paul, who came over to look.

“Great,” he said grimly. “So what does that tell us? What direction do we go from-”

The satchel was suddenly snatched off the table, and Sister looked up, stunned.

The bony-faced man in the leather vest had it and was backing away with a grin on his thin-lipped mouth. “Looky what I got me, boys!” he shouted. “Got me a nice new bag, didn’t I?”

Sister stood very still. “Give that back to me,” she said, quietly but firmly.

“Got me somethin’ to shit in when it’s too cold in the woods!” the man responded, and the others around the table laughed. His small black eyes darted toward Paul, daring him to move.

“Quit fuckin’ around, Earl!” Derwin said. “What do you need a bag for?”

“’Cause I do, that’s why! Let’s see what we got in here!” Earl dug a hand into it and started pulling out pairs of socks, scarves and gloves. And then he reached way down and his hand came up with a ring of glass.

It flared with bloody color in his grip, and he stared at it in open-mouthed wonder.

The tavern was silent but for the popping of fireplace logs.

The red-haired hag slowly rose from her chair. “Sweet Mother of Jaysus,” she whispered.

The men around the card table gawked, and the black-haired girl left her piano stool to limp closer.

Earl held the glass ring before his face, watching the colors ebb and swell like blood rushing through arteries. But his grip on the ring produced brutal hues: muddy brown, oily yellow and ebony.

“That belongs to me.” Sister’s voice was muffled behind the scarf. “Please give it back.”

Paul took a forward step. Earl’s hand went to the butt of his pistol with a gunfighter’s reflexes, and Paul stopped. “Found me a play-pretty, didn’t I?” Earl asked. The ring was pulsing faster, turning darker and uglier by the second. All but two of the spikes had been broken off over the years. “Jewels!” Earl had just realized where the colors were coming from. “This thing must be worth a goddamned fortune!”

“I’ve asked you to give it back,” Sister said.

“Got me a fuckin’ fortune!” Earl shouted, his eyes glazed and greedy. “Break this damned glass open and dig them jewels out, I got me a fortune!” He grinned crazily, lifted the ring over his head and began to prance for his friends at the table. “Looky here! I got me a halo, boys!”

Paul took another step, and instantly Earl spun to face him. The pistol was already leaving his holster.

But Sister was ready. The short-barreled shotgun she’d drawn from beneath her parka boomed like a shout from God.

Earl was lifted off the floor and propelled through the air, his body crashing over tables and his own gunshot blasting a chunk from a wooden beam above Sister’s head. He landed in a crumpled heap, one hand still gripping the ring. The murky colors pulsed wildly.

The man in the dogskin coat started to rise. Sister pumped another round into the smoking chamber, whirled and pressed the barrel to his throat. “You want some of it?” He shook his head and sank down into his chair again. “Guns on the table,” she ordered-and eight pistols were pushed over the grimy cards and coins to the table’s center.

Paul had his.357 Magnum cocked and waiting. He caught a movement from the bartender and aimed it at the man’s head. Derwin raised his hands. “No trouble, friend,” Derwin said nervously. “I want to live, okay?”

The pulsing of the glass ring was beginning to stutter and slow. Paul edged toward the dying man as Sister held her sawed-off riot gun on the others. She’d found the weapon three years earlier in a deserted highway patrol station outside the ruins of Wichita, and it packed enough punch to knock an elephant down. She’d only had to use it a few times, with the same result as now.

Paul tried to avoid all the blood. A fly buzzed past his face and hovered over the ring. It was large and green, an ugly thing, and Paul was taken aback for a few seconds because it had been years since he’d seen a fly; he’d thought they were all dead. A second fly joined the first, and they swirled in the air around the twitching body and the glass circle.

Paul bent down. The ring flared bright red for an instant-and then went black. He worked it from the corpse’s grip, and in his hand the rainbow colors returned. Then he shoved it down into the satchel again and covered it over with the socks, scarves and gloves. A fly landed on his cheek, and he jerked his head because the little bastard felt like a freezing nail pressed to his skin.

He returned the road atlas to the satchel. All eyes were on the woman with the shotgun. She took the satchel and retreated slowly toward the door, keeping the weapon aimed at the center of the card table. She told herself she’d had no choice but to kill the man, and that was the end of it; she’d come too far with the glass circle to let some fool break it to pieces.

“Hey,” the man in the dogskin coat said. “You ain’t gonna go without us buyin’ you a drink, are you?”

“What?”

“Earl wasn’t worth a damn,” another man volunteered, and he leaned over to spit tobacco into his pail. “Trigger-happy idjit was always killin’ people.”

“He shot Jimmy Ridgeway dead right here, coupla months ago,” Derwin said. “Bastard was too good with that pistol.”

“Till now,” the other man said. The card players were already dividing the dead man’s coins.

“Here y’go.” Derwin picked up two glasses and drew oily amber liquid from a keg. “Homemade brew. Tastes kinda funky, but it’ll sure get your mind off your troubles.” He offered the glasses to Paul and Sister. “On the house.”

It had been months since Paul’s last sip of alcohol. The strong, woody smell of the stuff drifted to him like a siren’s perfume. His insides were quaking; he’d never used the Magnum on a human being before, and he prayed that he’d never have to. Paul accepted the glass and thought the fumes might sear off his eyebrows, but he took a drink anyway.

It was like gargling molten metal. Tears popped from his eyes. He coughed, sputtered and gasped as the moonshine-fermented out of God only knew what-slashed down his throat. The red-haired hag cackled like a crow, and some of the men in the back guffawed as well.

As Paul tried to regain his breath Sister set the satchel aside-not too far-and raised the second glass. The bartender said, “Yeah, you did ol’ Earl Hocutt a good deed. He’s been wantin’ somebody to kill him ever since his wife and little girl died of the fever last year.”

“Is that so?” she asked as she pulled the scarf away from her face. She lifted the glass to her deformed lips and drank without a flinch.

Derwin’s eyes widened, and he backed away so fast he knocked a shelf of glasses and mugs to the floor.

Fifty-One - [Toadfrog With Golden

Wings]

Sister was prepared for the reaction. She’d seen it many times before. She sipped the moonshine again, found it no better or worse than many bottles she’d drunk from on the streets of Manhattan, and sensed everyone in the bar watching her. Want a good look? she thought. Want a real good look? She put the glass down and turned to let them all see.

The red-haired hag stopped cackling as abruptly as if she’d been kicked in the throat.

“Good God A’mighty,” the tobacco chewer managed to say, after he’d swallowed his chaw.

The lower half of Sister’s face was a mass of gray growths, knotty tendrils twisted and intertwined over her chin, jaw and cheeks. The hard growths had pulled Sister’s mouth slightly to the left, giving her a sardonic smile. Under the hood of her parka, her skull was a scabby crust; the growths had completely enclosed her scalp and were now beginning to send out tough gray tendrils across her forehead and over both ears.

“A leper!” One of the card players scrambled to his feet. “She’s got leprosy!”

The mention of that dreaded disease made the others leap up, forgetting guns, cards and coins, and back across the tavern. “Get outta here!” another one yelled. “Don’t give that shit to us!”

“Leper! Leper!” the red-haired hag shrieked, picking up a mug to throw at Sister. There were other shouts and threats, but Sister was unperturbed. This was a common scene wherever she was forced to expose her face.

Over the cacophony of voices there came a sharp, insistent crack!… crack!… crack!

Silhouetted by light from the fireplace, a thin figure stood against the far wall, methodically beating a wooden staff over one of the tabletops. The noise gradually won out, until an uneasy silence remained.

“Gentlemen… and ladies,” the man with the wooden staff said in a ravaged voice, “I can assure you that our friend’s affliction is not leprosy. As a matter of fact, I don’t think it’s the least bit contagious-so you don’t have to ruin your underdrawers.”

“What the hell do you know, scumbag?” the man in the dogskin coat challenged.

The other figure paused, then positioned the staff under his left armpit. He began to shuffle forward, his left trouser leg pinned up just above the knee. He wore a ragged dark brown coat over a dirty beige cardigan sweater, and on his hands were gloves so well worn the fingers were poking through.

Lamplight touched his face. Silver hair cascaded around his shoulders, though the crown of his scalp was bald and mottled with brown keloids. He had a short, grizzled gray beard and finely chiseled facial features, his nose thin and elegant. Sister thought he might have been handsome but for the bright crimson keloid that covered one side of his face like a port-wine stain. He stopped, standing between Sister, Paul and the others. “My name is not scumbag,” he said, with an air of ruined royalty. His deep-set, tormented gray eyes shifted toward the man in the dogskin coat. “I used to be Hugh Ryan. Doctor Hugh Ryan, surgeon in residence at Amarillo Medical Center in Amarillo, Texas.”

“You a doctor?” the other man countered. “Bullshit!”

“My current living standards make these gentlemen think I was born terminally thirsty,” he told Sister, and he lifted one palsied hand. “Of course, I’m not suited for a scalpel anymore. But then again, who is?” He approached Sister and touched her face. The odor of his unwashed body almost knocked her down, but she’d smelled worse. “This is not leprosy,” he repeated. “This is a mass of fibrous tissue originating from a subcutaneous source. How deep the fibroid layer penetrates, I don’t know-but I’ve seen this condition many times before, and in my opinion it’s not contagious.”

“We’ve seen other people with it, too,” Paul said. He was used to the way Sister looked because it had happened so gradually, beginning with the black warts on her face. He’d examined his own head and face for them, but so far he was unaffected. “What causes it?”

Hugh Ryan shrugged, still pressing at the growths. “Possibly the skin’s reaction to radiation, pollutants, lack of sunshine for so long-who knows? Oh, I’ve seen maybe a hundred or more people with it, in many different stages. Fortunately, there seems to remain a small breathing and eating space no matter how severe the condition becomes.”

“It’s leprosy, I say!” the red-haired hag contended, but the men were settling down again, returning to their table. A few of them left the tavern, and the others continued to stare at Sister with a sickened fascination.

“It itches like hell, and sometimes my head aches like it’s about to split open,” Sister admitted. “How do I get rid of it?”

“That, unfortunately, I can’t say. I’ve never seen Job’s Mask regress-but then, I only saw most of the cases in passing.”

“Job’s Mask? Is that what it’s called?”

“Well, that’s what I call it. Seems appropriate, doesn’t it?”

Sister grunted. She and Paul had seen dozens of people with “Job’s Mask” scattered across the nine states they’d traveled through. In Kansas, they’d come upon a colony of forty afflicted people who’d been forced out of a nearby settlement by their own families; in Iowa, Sister had seen a man whose head was so encrusted he was unable to hold it upright. Job’s Mask afflicted men and women with equal savagery, and Sister had even seen a few teenagers with it, but children younger than seven or eight seemed to be immune-or at least, Sister had never seen any babies or young children with it, though both parents might be horribly deformed. “Will I have this for the rest of my life?”

Hugh shrugged again, unable to help any further. His eyes locked with hungry need on Sister’s glass of moonshine, still atop the bar. She said, “Be my guest,” and he drank it down as if it were iced tea on a hot August afternoon.

“Thank you very much.” He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and glanced at the dead man lying in the bloody sawdust. The chunky black-haired girl was eagerly going through the pockets. “There is no right and wrong in this world anymore,” he said. “There’s only a faster gun and a higher level of violence.” He nodded toward the table he’d been occupying, over by the fireplace. “If you please?” he asked Sister, with a note of pleading. “It’s been so long since I’ve been able to talk to someone of obvious breeding and intellect.”

Sister and Paul were in no hurry. She picked up her satchel, sliding her shotgun into the leather sheath that hung along her hip beneath the parka. Paul returned his Magnum to its holster, and they followed Hugh Ryan.

Derwin finally steeled himself to emerge from behind the bar, and the man in the dogskin coat helped him carry Earl’s body out the back door.

As Hugh got his remaining leg propped up on a chair Sister couldn’t help but notice the stuffed trophies that adorned the wall around the Bucket of Blood’s fireplace: an albino squirrel, a deer’s head with three eyes, a boar with a single eye at the center of its forehead, and a two-headed woodchuck. “Derwin’s a hunter,” Hugh explained. “You can find all sorts of things in the woods around here. Amazing what the radiation’s done, isn’t it?” He admired the trophies for a moment “You don’t want to sleep too far from the light,” he said, turning his attention back to Paul and Sister. “You really don’t.” He reached for the half glass of moonshine he’d been drinking before they’d come in. Two green flies buzzed around his head, and Paul watched them circling.

Hugh motioned toward the satchel. “I couldn’t help but notice that glass trinket. May I ask what it is?”

“Just something I picked up.”

“Where? A museum?”

“No, I found it in a pile of rubble.”

“It’s a beautiful thing,” he said. “I’d be careful with it, if I were you. I’ve met people who’d behead you for a piece of bread.”

Sister nodded. “That’s why I carry the shotgun-and that’s why I learned to use it, too.”

“Indeed.” He swilled down the rest of the moonshine and smacked his lips. “Ah! Nectar of the gods!”

“I wouldn’t go that far.” Paul’s throat still felt as if it had been scraped with razors.

“Well, taste is relative, isn’t it?” Hugh spent a moment licking the inside of the glass to get the last drops before he put it aside. “I used to be a connoisseur of French brandies. I used to have a wife, three children, and a Spanish villa with a hot tub and a swimming pool.” He touched his stump. “I used to have another leg, too. But that’s the past, isn’t it? And beware of dwelling on the past if you want to keep your sanity.” He stared into the fire, then looked across the table at Sister. “So. Where have you been, and where are you going?”

“Everywhere,” she replied. “And nowhere in particular.”

For the past seven years, Sister and Paul Thorson had been following a dreamwalk path-a blindman’s buff of pictures Sister had seen in the depths of the glass circle. They’d traveled from Pennsylvania to Kansas, had found the town of Matheson-but Matheson had been burned to the ground, the ruins covered with snow. They’d searched Matheson, found only skeletons and destruction, and then they’d reached the parking lot of a burned-out building that might have been a department store or supermarket.

And on that snow-swept parking lot, in the midst of desolation, Sister had heard the whisper of God.

It was a small thing, at first: The toe of Paul’s boot had uncovered a card.

“Hey!” Paul had called out. “Look at this!” He’d wiped the dirt and snow from it and handed it to her. The colors were bleached out, but it showed a beautiful woman in violet robes, the sun shining overhead and a lion and lamb at her feet; she held a silver shield with what might have been a flaming phoenix at its center, and she wore a blazing crown. The woman’s hair was afire, and she stared courageously into the distance. At the top of the card were the faded letters THE EMPRESS.

“It’s a tarot card,” Paul had said, and Sister’s knees had almost buckled.

More cards, bits of glass, clothes and other debris had been buried under the snow. Sister saw a spot of color, picked it up-and found she was holding an image she recognized: a card with a figure shrouded in black, its face white and masklike. Its eyes were silver and hateful, and in the center of its forehead was a third, scarlet eye. She’d torn that card to pieces rather than add it to her bag along with The Empress.

And then Sister had stepped on something soft, and as she bent down to brush the snow away and saw what it was, tears had filled her eyes.

It was a scorched, blue-furred doll. As she lifted it in her arms she saw the little plastic ring hanging down, and she pulled it. In the cold and snowy silence, a labored voice moaned “Coookieees,” and the sound drifted over the lot where skeletons lay dreaming.

The Cookie Monster doll had gone into Sister’s bag-and then it had been time to leave Matheson, because there was no child’s skeleton in that parking lot, and Sister knew now more than ever that she was searching for a child.

They’d roamed Kansas for more than two years, living in various struggling settlements; they had turned north into Nebraska, east into Iowa, and now south to Missouri. A land of suffering and brutality had unfolded itself to them like a continuing, unescapable hallucination. On many occasions, Sister had peered into the glass circle and caught sight of a hazy human face looking back, as if through a badly discolored mirror. That particular image had remained constant over seven years, and though Sister couldn’t tell very much about the face, she thought that it had begun as a young face-that of a child, though whether male or female she couldn’t tell-and over the years the face had changed. The last time she’d seen it was four months ago, and Sister had had the impression that the facial features were all but wiped clean. Since then the hazy image had not reappeared.

Sometimes Sister felt sure the next day would bring an answer-but the days had passed, becoming weeks, months and years, and still she continued searching. The roads kept carrying her and Paul across devastated countryside, through deserted towns and around the perimeter of jagged ruins where cities had stood. Many times she’d been discouraged, had thought of giving it up and staying in one of the settlements they’d passed through, but that was before her Job’s Mask had gotten so bad. Now she was beginning to think the only place she might be welcome was in a colony of Job’s Mask sufferers.

But the truth was that she feared staying in one place too long. She kept looking over her shoulder, afraid that a dark figure with a shifting face had finally found her and was coming up from behind. In her nightmares of Doyle Halland, or Dal Hallmark, or whatever he called himself now, he had a single scarlet eye in his forehead like the grim figure on the tarot card, and it was relentlessly probing for her.

Often, in the years past, Sister had felt her skin prickle as if he was somewhere very near, about to close in on her. At those times, she and Paul had hit the road again, and Sister dreaded crossroads because she knew the wrong turn could lead them to his waiting hands.

She pushed the memories out of her mind. “How about you? Have you been here long?”

“Eight months. After the seventeenth of July, I went north from Amarillo with my family. We lived in a settlement on the Purgatoire River, south of Las Animas, Colorado, for three years. A lot of Indians live around there; some of them were Vietnam vets, and they taught us stupid city folks how to build mud huts and stay alive.” He smiled painfully. “It’s a shock to be living in a million-dollar mansion one month and the next find yourself under a roof of mud and cow dung. Anyway, two of our children died the first year-radiation poisoning-but we were warm when the snow started falling, and we felt damned lucky.”