Swan Song (47 page)

“Why didn’t you stay there?” Paul asked.

Hugh stared into the fire. It was a long time before he answered. “We… had a community of about two hundred people. We had a supply of corn, some flour and salted beef, and a lot of canned food. The river water wasn’t exactly clean, but it was keeping us alive.” He rubbed the stump of his leg. “Then they came.”

“They? Who?”

“First it was three men and two women. They came in a Jeep and a Buick with an armored windshield. They stopped in Purgatoire Flats-that’s what we called our town-and they wanted to buy half our food. Of course, we couldn’t sell it, not for any price. We’d starve if we did. Then they threatened us. They said we’d regret not giving them what they wanted. I remember that Curtis Redfeather-he was our mayor, a big Pawnee who’d served in Vietnam-went to his hut and came back with an automatic rifle. He told them to go, and they left.” Hugh paused; he slowly clenched his fists atop the table.

“They came back,” he said softly. “That night. Oh, yes, they came back-with three hundred armed soldiers and trucks that they’d made into tanks. They started smashing Purgatoire Flats to the ground… and killing everybody. Everybody.” His voice cracked, and he couldn’t go on for a minute, “People were running, trying to get away,” he said. “But the soldiers had machine guns. I ran, with my wife and daughter. I saw Curtis Redfeather shot down and run over by a Jeep. He didn’t… he didn’t even look like a human being anymore.”

Hugh closed his eyes, but there was such torment etched into his face that Sister could not look at him. She watched the fire. “My wife was shot in the back,” he continued. “I stopped to help her, and I told my daughter to run for the river. I never saw her again. But… I was picking up my wife when the bullets hit me. Two or three, I think. In the leg. Somebody hit me in the head, and I fell. I remember… I woke up, and the barrel of a rifle was pointed in my face. And someone-a man’s voice-said, Tell them the Army of Excellence passed this way.’ The Army of Excellence,” he repeated bitterly, and he opened his eyes. They were shocked and bloodshot. “Four or five people were left, and they made a stretcher for me. They carried me more than thirty miles to the north, to another settlement-but that one was ashes, too, by the time we got there. My leg was shattered. It had to come off. I told them how to do it. And I hung on, and we kept going, and that was four years ago.” He looked at Sister and leaned slightly forward in his chair. “For God’s sake,” he said urgently, “don’t go west. That’s where the Battlelands are.”

“The Battlelands?” Paul asked. “What do you mean?”

“I mean they’re having war out there-in Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska-the Dakotas, too. Oh, I’ve met plenty of refugees from the west. They call it the Battlelands because so many armies are fighting out there: the American Allegiance, Nolan’s Raiders, the Army of Excellence, Troop Hydra and maybe five or six others.”

“The war’s done.” Sister frowned. “What the hell are they fighting over?”

“Land. Settlements. Food, guns, gasoline-whatever’s left. They’re out of their minds; they want to kill somebody, and if it can’t be the Russians, they’ve got to invent enemies. I’ve heard the Army of Excellence is on a rampage against survivors with keloids.” He touched the scarlet, upraised scar that covered half his face. “Supposed to be the mark of Satan.”

Paul shifted uneasily in his chair. In their travels, he and Sister had heard about settlements being attacked and burned by bands of marauders, but this was the first they’d heard of organized forces. “How big are these armies? Who’s leading them?”

“Maniacs, so-called patriots, military men, you name it,” Hugh said. “Last week a man and woman who’d seen the American Allegiance passed through here. They said it numbered about four or five thousand, and a crazy preacher from California is leading it. He calls himself the Savior and wants to kill everybody who won’t follow him. I’ve heard Troop Hydra’s executing blacks, Hispanics, Orientals, Jews and everybody else they consider foreign. The Army of Excellence is supposedly led by an ex-military man-a Vietnam war hero. They’re the bastards with the tanks. God help us if those maniacs start moving east.”

“All we want is enough gasoline to get to the next town,” Paul said. “We’re heading south to the Gulf of Mexico.” He swatted at a fly that landed on his hand; again, there was a feeling of being pricked by a freezing nail.

Hugh smiled wistfully. “The Gulf of Mexico. My God, I haven’t seen the Gulf for a long, long time.”

“What’s the nearest town from here?” Sister asked.

“I suppose that would be Mary’s Rest, south of what used to be Jefferson City. The road’s not too good, though. They used to have a big pond at Mary’s Rest. Anyway, it’s not far-about fifty miles.”

“How do we get there on an empty tank?”

Hugh glanced over at the bloody sawdust. “Well, Earl Hocutt’s truck is parked out front. I doubt he’ll need the gasoline anymore, don’t you?”

Paul nodded. They had a length of garden hose in the Jeep, and Paul had become very proficient at stealing gas.

A fly landed on the table in front of Hugh. He suddenly upended his moonshine glass over it and trapped the insect. It buzzed angrily around and around, and Hugh watched it circling. “You don’t see flies too often,” he said. “A few of them stay in here because of the warmth, I guess. And the blood. That one’s mad as the Devil, isn’t he?”

Sister heard the low hum of another fly as it passed her head. It made a slow circle above the table and shot toward a chink in the wall. “Is there a place we could spend the night here?” she asked Hugh.

“I can find one for you. It won’t be much more than a hole in the ground with a lid over it, but you won’t freeze to death and you won’t get your throats slit.” He tapped the glass, and the large green fly tried to attack his finger. “But if I find you a safe place to sleep,” he said, “I’d like something in return.”

“What’s that?”

Hugh smiled. “I’d like to see the Gulf of Mexico.”

“Forget it!” Paul told him. “We don’t have the room.”

“Oh, you’d be surprised what a one-legged old man can squeeze himself into.”

“More weight means using more gasoline, not to mention food and water. No. Sorry.”

“I weigh about as much as a wet feather,” Hugh persisted. “And I can carry along my own food and water. If you want payment for taking me with you, perhaps I can interest you in two jugs of moonshine I’ve kept hidden for an emergency.”

Paul was about to say no again, but his lips locked. The moonshine was about the nastiest stuff he’d ever tasted, but it sure had quickened his pulse and kicked on his furnace.

“How about it?” Hugh asked Sister. “Some of the bridges are broken down between here and Mary’s Rest. I can do a lot better for you than that antique map you’re carrying.”

Her first impulse was to agree with Paul, but she saw the suffering in Hugh Ryan’s gray eyes; he wore the expression of a once-loyal dog that had been beaten and abandoned by a trusted master.

“Please?” he said. “There’s nothing for me here. I’d like to see if the waves still roll in like they used to.”

Sister thought about it. No doubt the man could scrunch himself up in the back of the Jeep, and they might well need a guide to get to the next town. He was waiting for an answer. “You find us a safe place to spend the night,” she said, “and we’ll talk about it in the morning. That’s the best I can do for now. Deal?”

Hugh hesitated, searching Sister’s face. Hers was a strong face, he decided, and her eyes weren’t dead like those of so many others he’d seen. It was unfortunate that most likely the Job’s Mask would eventually seal them shut. “Deal,” he said, and they shook on it.

They left the Bucket of Blood to get the gas from the dead man’s truck. Behind them, the red-haired hag scuttled over to the table they’d left and watched the fly buzzing around in the upturned glass. She suddenly picked it up and snatched the fly as it tried to escape, and before it could get loose from her hand she shoved the fly into her mouth and crunched her teeth down on it.

Her face contorted. She opened her mouth and spat a small glob of grayish-green into the fire, where it sizzled like acid.

“Nasty!” she said, and she wiped her tongue with sawdust.

Fifty-Two - [Toadfrog With Golden

Wings]

He was waiting in the dark for them to come home.

The wind was strong. It sang sweetly to his soul of millions dead and the dying not yet done, but when the wind was so strong he couldn’t search very far. He sat in the dark, in his new face and his new skin, with the wind shrilling around the shed like a party noisemaker, and thought that maybe-just maybe-it would be tonight.

But he understood the twists and turns of time, and so if it was not tonight, there was always tomorrow. He could be very patient, if he had to be.

Seven years had passed quickly for him; he had traveled the roads, a solitary journeyer, through Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee and Arkansas. He had sometimes lodged in struggling settlements, sometimes lived by himself in caves and abandoned cars as the mood struck him. Wherever he passed was darkened by his presence, the settlements sucked dry of hope and compassion and left to blow away as the inhabitants killed one another or themselves. He had the knack of showing them how futile life was, and what the tragedy of false hope could bring about. If your child is hungry, kill it, he urged starving mothers; think of suicide as the noble thing, he told men who asked his advice. He was a fountain of information and wisdom that he was eager to share: All dogs spread cancer and must be killed; people with brown keloids have developed a taste for the flesh of children; there’s a new city being built in the wilds of Canada, and that’s where you should go; you could get a lot of protein by eating your own fingers-after all, how many do you need?

He was continually astonished by how easy it was to make them believe.

It was a great party. But for one thing, and that one thing gnawed at him day and night.

Where was the ring of glass?

The woman-Sister-was surely dead by now. He didn’t care about her, anyway. Where was the glass thing, and who had it? Many times he’d sensed he was close to it, that the next crossroads would take him right to it, but the instincts had always faded, and he was left deciding to try a new direction. He’d searched the mind of everyone he met, but the woman was not in there, and neither was the ring of glass. So he went on. But with the passage of years his traveling had slowed somewhat, because there were so many opportunities in the settlements, and because even if the glass ring was still out there somewhere, it didn’t seem to be of any consequence. It wasn’t doing anything, was it? It was still his party, and nothing had changed. The threat he’d felt from it, back in the house in New Jersey, still remained with him, but whatever else the glass ring was, it was surely not making a difference in his existence or in the things he saw around him.

No problemo, he thought-but where was it? Who had it? And why had it come to be?

Often he recalled the day he’d turned off Interstate 80 on his French racing bicycle and headed south. He’d sometimes wondered what would have happened if he’d gone back east along I-80. Would he have found the woman and the glass ring? Why hadn’t the sentries at that Red Cross station seen her by then, if indeed she was still alive?

But he couldn’t see everything, or know everything; he could only see and know what his counterfeit eyes told him, or what he picked from the human mind, or what the searchers brought him back from the dark.

They were coming to him right now. He sensed the mass of them gathering together from all points of the compass and approaching against the wind. He pushed himself toward the door, and the wheels beneath him squeaked.

The first one touched his cheek and was sucked through the flesh as if into an opening vortex.

His eyes rolled back in his head, and he looked inward. Saw dark forest, heard wind shrieking, and nothing more.

Another thing that resembled a fly squeezed through a hole in the wall and landed on his forehead, instantly being drawn into the rippling flesh. Two more joined it and were pulled down.

He saw more dark woods, an icy puddle, a small animal of some kind lying dead in the brush. A crow swept in, snapped and spun away.

More flies penetrated his face. More images whirled through him: a woman scrubbing clothes in a lamplit room, two men fighting with knives in an alley, a two-headed boar snuffling in garbage, its four eyes glinting wetly.

The flies crawled over his face, being sucked through the flesh one after the other.

He saw dark houses, heard someone playing a harmonica-badly-and someone else clapping in time; faces around a bonfire, a conversation of what baseball games used to be like on summer nights; a skinny man and woman, entwined on a mattress; hands at work, cleaning a rifle; an explosion of light and a voice saying, “Found me a play-pretty, didn’t-”

Stop.

The image of light and the voice froze behind his eyes like a frame of a movie.

He trembled.

Flies were still on his face, but he concentrated on the image of the light. It was just a red flare, and he couldn’t tell much about it yet. His hands clenched into fists, his long and dirty nails carving half moons into the skin but drawing no blood.

Forward, he thought, and the film of memory began to unreel.

“… I?” the voice-a man’s voice-said. And then an awestruck whisper: “Jewels!”

Stop.

He was looking down from above, and there in the man’s hand was…

Forward.

… the circle of glass, glowing with dark red and brown. A room with sawdust on the floor. Glasses. Cards on a table.

He knew that place. He’d been there before, and he’d sent his searchers there because it was a place where travelers stopped. The Bucket of Blood was about a mile away, just over the next hill.

His inner eye watched it unfold, from the perspective of a fly. The blast of a gun, a hot shock wave, a body spewing blood and tumbling over tables.

A woman’s voice said, “You want some of it?” Then an order: “Guns on the table.”

I’ve found you, he thought.

He caught a glimpse of her face. Turned out to be a beauty, didn’t you? he mused. Was that her? Yes, yes! It had to be her! The glass ring went into a satchel. It had to be her!

The scene continued. Another face: a man with sharp blue eyes and a gray beard. “Leper! Leper!” someone shouted. And then a silver-haired man was there, and he knew that face as belonging to the one everybody called Scumbag. More voices: “Be my guest… Derwin’s a hunter… used to have another leg, too… For God’s sake, don’t go west… supposed to be the mark of Satan…”

He smiled.

“… We’re heading south… that would be Mary’s Rest… doubt he’ll need the gasoline anymore, don’t you?”

The voices grew hazy, the light changed, and there were dark woods and houses below.

He played the memory-movie over again. It was her, all right. “… We’re heading south… that would be Mary’s Rest…”

Mary’s Rest, he thought. Fifty miles to the south. I’ve found you! Going south to Mary’s Rest!

But what was the point of waiting? Sister and the circle of glass might still be over at the Bucket of Blood, only a mile away. There was still time to get over there and-

“Lester? I’ve brought you a bowl of-”

There was a crash of breaking pottery and a gasp of horror.

He let his eyes resurface again. At the shed’s door stood the woman who’d taken him in three weeks ago as a handyman; she was still very pretty, and it was too bad that a wild animal had chewed up her little girl in the woods one evening two weeks ago, because the child had looked just like her. The woman had dropped his bowl of soup. She was a clumsy bitch, he thought. Anybody with two fingers on each hand was bound to be clumsy.

The claw of her left hand held a lantern, and by its light she’d seen the rippling, fly-swarmed face of Lester the handyman.

“Howdy, Miz Sperry,” he whispered, and the fly-things whirled around his head.

The woman took a backward step toward the open door. Her face was frozen into a horrified rictus, and he wondered why he’d ever thought she was pretty.

“You’re not afraid, are you, Miz Sperry?” he asked her; he reached out his arms, dug his fingers into the dirt floor and drew himself forward. The wheels squeaked, badly in need of oil.

“I… I…” She tried to speak, but she couldn’t. Her legs had seized up, too, and he knew that she knew there was nowhere to run except the woods.

“Surely you’re not afraid of me,” he said softly. “I’m not much of a man, am I? I do ’preciate you havin’ pity on a poor man like me, I surely do.” The wheels squeaked, squeaked.

“Stay… away from me…”

“This is ol’ Lester you’re talkin’ to, Miz Sperry. Just ol’ Lester, that’s all. You can tell me anything.”

She almost broke away then, almost ran, but he said, “Ol’ Lester makes the pain go away, don’t he?” and she settled back into his grip like warm putty. “Why don’t you put that lamp down, Miz Sperry? Let’s have us a nice talk. I can fix thangs.”

The lantern was slowly put on the floor.

So easy, he thought. This one particularly, because she was already walking dead.

He was bored with her. “I believe I need to fix that there gun,” he said, and he nodded silkily toward the rifle in the corner. “Will you fetch it for me?”

She picked it up.

“Miz Sperry?” he said. “I want you to put the barrel in your mouth and your finger on the trigger. Yes’m, go ahead. Just like that. Oh, doin’ just fine!”

Her eyes were bright and shining, and there were tears rolling down her cheeks.

“Now… I need you to test that there gun for me. I want you to pull the trigger and tell me if it works. Okay?”

She resisted him, just a second of the will to live that she probably didn’t even know she had anymore.

“Lester’s gon’ fix thangs,” he said. “Little tiny pull, now.”

The rifle went off.

He pulled himself forward, and the wheels squeaked over her body. The Bucket of Blood! he thought. Got to get over there!

But then-no, no. Wait. Just wait.

He knew Sister was on her way to Mary’s Rest. It wouldn’t take him as long to walk cross-country as it would take her to drive over what was left of the road. He could beat her there and be waiting. There were a lot of people in Mary’s Rest, a lot of opportunities; he’d been thinking of traveling down that way in the next few days, anyway. She might already have left the tavern and be on the road right now. This time I won’t lose you, he vowed. I’ll get to Mary’s Rest before you. Ol’ Lester’s gon’ fix thangs for you, too, bitch!

This was a good disguise, he decided. Some modifications were needed if he was going to walk the distance, but it would do. And by the time the bitch got to Mary’s Rest, he’d be set up and ready to Watusi on her bones until she was dust for the pot.

The rest of the flies were sucked into his face, but they brought information that was of no use to him. He stretched his torso, and after a minute or two he was able to stand.

Then he rolled down the legs of his trousers, picked up his little red wagon and began walking, his feet bare, through the snow toward the forest. He began to sing, very quietly: “Here we go ’round the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush…”

The darkness took him.