Swan Song (55 page)

The light was quickly fading, and Josh knew this was one place he wouldn’t walk the alleys at night even for a T-bone steak. He went into the shack and shut the door.

Seeds

The Hand Revealed /

Swan and the Big Dude /

A Decent Wish /

The Savage Prince /

Fighting Fire with Fire/

Fifty-Nine - [Seeds]

Swan awakened from a dream. She’d been running through a field of human bodies that moved like stalks of wheat before the wind, and behind her advanced the thing with the single scarlet eye, its scythe lopping off heads, arms and legs as it sought her out. Only her head was too heavy, her feet weighted down by yellow mud, and she couldn’t run fast enough. The monster was getting nearer, its scythe whistling through the air like a shriek, and suddenly she’d fallen over a child’s corpse and she was looking at its white hands, one clawing the earth and the other clenched into a fist.

She lay on the floor of Glory Bowen’s shack. Embers behind the stove’s grate still cast a little light and a breath of heat. She slowly sat up and leaned against the wall, the image of the child’s hands fixed in her mind. Nearby, Josh lay curled up on the floor, breathing heavily and deeply asleep. Closer to the stove, Rusty lay sleeping under a thin blanket, his head on the patchwork pillow. Glory had done a fine job of cleaning and stitching the wounds, but she’d said the next couple of days would be rough for him. It had been very kind of her to let them spend the night and share her water and a little stew. Aaron had asked Swan dozens of questions about her condition, what the land was like beyond Mary’s Rest, and what all she’d seen. Glory had told Aaron to stop pestering her, but Swan wasn’t bothered; the boy had a curious mind, and that was a rare thing worth encouraging.

Glory told them her husband had been a Baptist minister back in Wynne, Arkansas, when the bombs hit. The radiation of Little Rock had killed a lot of people in the town, and Glory, her husband and their infant son had joined a caravan of wanderers looking for a safe place to settle. But there were no safe places. Four years later, they’d settled in Mary’s Rest, which at that time was a thriving settlement built around the pond. There’d been no minister or church in Mary’s Rest, and Glory’s husband had started building a house of worship with his own hands.

But then the typhoid epidemic came, Glory told them. People died by the score, and wild animals skulked in from the woods to gut the corpses. When the last of the community’s stockpile of canned food gave out, people started eating rats, boiling bark, roots, leather-even the dirt itself-into “soup.” One night the church had caught fire, and Glory’s husband had died trying to save it. The blackened ruins were still standing, because nobody had the energy or will to build it back. She and her son had stayed alive because she was a good seamstress, and people paid her with extra food, coffee and such to patch their clothes. That was the story of her life, Glory had said; that was how she’d gotten to be an old woman when she was barely thirty-five.

Swan listened to the sound of the roving wind. Was it bringing the answer to the magic mirror’s riddle closer? she wondered. Or was it blowing it further away?

And quite suddenly, as the wind faltered to draw another breath, Swan heard the urgent noise of a dog barking.

Her heart thudded in her chest. The barking ebbed away, was gone-then began to swell again, from somewhere very near.

Swan would know that bark anywhere.

She started to reach over and rouse Josh to tell him that Killer had found his way, but he snorted and muttered in his sleep. She let him alone, stood up with the aid of the dowsing rod and walked to the door.

The barking faded as the wind took a different turn. But she understood what it said: “Hurry! Come see what I’ve got to show you!”

She put on her coat, buttoned it up to her neck and slipped out of the shack into the tumultuous dark.

She couldn’t see the terrier. Josh had unbridled Mule to let the horse fend for himself, and he’d wandered off to find shelter.

The wind came back, and with it the barking. Where was it coming from? The left, she thought. No, the right! She walked down the steps. There was no sign of Killer, and now the barking was gone, too. But she was sure it had come from the right, maybe from that alley over there, the same alley Aaron had taken her along to show her the pond.

She hesitated. It was cold out here, and dark except for the glow of a bonfire a few alleys away. Had she heard Killer’s barking or not? she asked herself. It wasn’t there now, just the wind shrilling through the alleys and around the shacks.

The image of the child’s frozen hands came to her. What was it about those hands that haunted her? she wondered. It was more than the fact that they belonged to a dead child-much, much more.

She didn’t know exactly when she made the decision, or when she took the first step. But suddenly she was entering the alley, questing with Crybaby before her, and she was walking toward the field.

Her vision blurred, her eye stinging with pain. She went blind, but she didn’t panic; she just waited it out, hoping that this wasn’t the time when her sight would go and not return. It came back, and Swan kept going.

She fell once over another corpse in the alley and heard an animal growling somewhere nearby, but she made it through. And then there was the field stretched before her, only faintly illuminated in the reflection of the distant bonfire. She began to walk across it, the odor of the poisonous pond thick in her nostrils, and hoped she remembered the way.

The barking returned, from off to her left. She changed her direction to follow it, and she called, “Killer! Where are you?” but the wind snatched her voice away.

Step by step, Swan crossed the field. In some places the snow was four or five inches thick, but in others the wind had blown it away to expose the bare ground. The barking ebbed and faded, returned from a slightly different direction. Swan altered her course by a few degrees, but she couldn’t see the terrier anywhere on the field.

The barking stopped.

So did Swan.

“Where are you?” she called. The wind shoved at her, almost knocked her down. She looked back at Mary’s Rest, could see the bonfire and a few lanterns burning in windows. It seemed a long way off. But she took one more step in the direction of the pond.

Crybaby touched something on the ground right in front of her, and Swan made out the shape of the child’s body.

The wind shifted. The barking came again-just a whisper now, from an unknown distance. It continued to fade, and just before it was gone Swan had a strange impression: that the sound no longer belonged to an old, weary dog. It had a note of youth in it, and strength, and roads yet to be traveled.

The sound was gone, and Swan was alone with the corpse of the child.

She bent down and looked at the hands. One clawing the earth, the other clenched into a fist. What was so familiar about that?

And then she knew: It was the way she herself had planted seeds when she was a little girl. One hand digging the hole, the other-

She grasped the bony fist and tried to pry it open. It resisted her, but she worked at it patiently and thought of opening a flower’s petals. The hand slowly revealed what was locked in its palm.

There were six wrinkled kernels of corn.

One hand digging the hole, she thought, and the other nestling the seeds.

Seeds.

The child had not died digging for roots. The child had died trying to plant shriveled seeds.

She held the kernels in her own palm. Was there untapped life in them, or were they only cold bits of nothing?

“Used to be a big ol’ cornfield out here,” Aaron had told her. “But everythin’ died.”

She thought of the apple tree bursting into new life. Thought of the green seedlings in the shape of her body. Thought of the flowers she had grown in dry, dusty earth a long time ago.

“Used to be a big ol’ cornfield out here.”

Swan looked at the body again. The child had died in a strange posture. Why was the child lying on its stomach on the cold ground instead of curling up to save the last bit of warmth? She gently grasped the shoulder and tried to turn it over; there was a faint crackling noise as the ragged clothes unstuck from the ground, but the body itself was as light as a husk.

And underneath the body was a small leather pouch.

She picked it up with a trembling hand, opened it and reached in with two fingers-but she already knew what she’d find.

In the pouch were more dried kernels of corn. The child had been protecting them with body heat. She realized she would have done the same thing, and that she and the child might have had a lot in common.

Here were the seeds. It was up to her to finish the job the dead child had begun.

She scraped away snow and thrust her fingers into the dirt. It was hard and clayey, full of ice and sharp pebbles. She brought up a handful and worked warmth into it; then she put one kernel into it and did what she had done when she planted seeds in the dust of Kansas-she gathered saliva in her mouth and spat into her handful of dirt. She rolled it into a ball, kept rolling it until she felt the tingling running up through her backbone, through her arm and fingers. Then she returned the dirt to the ground, pressing it into the hole she’d scooped it from.

And that was the first seed planted, but whether it would grow in this tormented earth or not, Swan didn’t know.

She picked up Crybaby, crawled a few feet away from the body and clawed up another handful of dirt. Either sharp ice or a stone cut her fingers, but she hardly noticed the pain; her mind was concentrated on the task. The pins-and-needles sensation was strengthening, starting to flow through her body in waves like power through humming wires.

Swan crawled ahead and planted a third seed. The cold was chewing down through her clothes, stiffening her bones, but she kept on going, scraping up a handful of dirt every two or three feet and planting a single seed. In some places the earth was frozen solid and as unyielding as granite, so she crawled on to another place, finding that the dirt cushioned beneath the snow was softer than the dirt where the covering snow had blown away. Still, her hands quickly became raw, and blood began to seep from cuts. Drops of blood mingled with the seeds and dirt as Swan continued to work, slowly and methodically, without pause.

She didn’t plant any seeds near the pond, but instead turned back toward Mary’s Rest to lay down another row. An animal wailed off in the distant woods-a high, shrill, lonely cry. She kept her mind on her work, her bloody hands searching through the snow to find pliable dirt. The cold finally pierced her, and she had to stop and huddle up. Ice was clogging her nostrils, her eye with its fragile vision almost frozen shut. She lay shivering, and it occurred to her that she’d feel stronger if she could sleep for a while. Just a short rest. Just a few minutes, and then she’d get back to work again.

Something nudged her side. She was dazed and weak, and she didn’t care to lift her head to see what it was. She was nudged again, much harder this time.

Swan rolled over, angled her head and looked up.

A warm breath hit her face. Mule was standing over her, as motionless as if carved from gray-dappled stone. She started to lie back down again, but Mule nudged her in the shoulder with his nose. He made a deep rumbling sound, and the breath floated from his nostrils like steam from a boiler.

He was not going to let her sleep. And the warm air that came from his lungs reminded her of how very cold it was, and how close she’d been to giving up. If she lay there much longer, she would freeze. She had to get moving again, get her circulation going.

Mule nudged her more firmly, and Swan sat up and said, “Okay, okay.” She lifted a blood-and-dirt-caked hand toward his muzzle, and Mule’s tongue came out to lick the tortured flesh.

She started planting seeds from the leather pouch again as Mule followed along a few paces behind her, his ears pricking up and quivering at the approaching cries of animals in the woods.

As the cold closed in and Swan forced herself to keep working everything became dreamlike and hazy, as if she were laboring underwater. Every once in a while Mule’s steamy breath would warm her, and then she began to sense furtive movement in the dark all around them, drawing closer. She heard the shriek of an animal nearby, and Mule answered with a husky grumble of warning. Swan kept pushing herself on, kept scraping through the snow to grip handfuls of dirt and replace them in the earth with seeds at their centers. Every movement of her fingers was an exercise in agony, and she knew the animals were being lured from the woods by the scent of her blood.

But she had to finish the job. There were still perhaps thirty or forty kernels left in the leather pouch, and Swan was determined to get them planted. The tingling currents coursed through her bones, continuing to grow stronger, almost painful now, and as she worked in the dark she imagined that she saw an occasional, tiny burst of sparks fly from the bloody mass of her fingers. She smelled a faint burned odor, like an electric plug beginning to overheat and short-circuit. Her face beneath the masklike crust of growths seethed with pain; when her vision would fade out, she would work for a few minutes in absolute blindness until her sight returned. She pushed herself onward-three or four feet, and one seed at a time.

An animal-a bobcat, she thought it was-growled somewhere off to the left, dangerously near, She tensed for its attack, heard Mule whinny and felt the pounding of his hooves against the earth as he galloped past her. Then the bobcat shrieked; there was the noise of turbulence in the snow-and, a minute or so later, Mule’s breath wanned her face again. Another animal growled a challenge, off to the right this time, and Mule whirled toward it as the bobcat leapt. Swan heard a high squeal of pain, heard Mule grunt as he was struck; then there was the jarring of Mule’s hooves against the ground-once, twice and again. He returned to her side, and she planted another seed.