Swan Song (77 page)

Eighty-Two - [A Five-Star

General]

The day came.

Somber light revealed the finished wall, glazed with three inches of ice and studded here and there with sharp wooden stakes, that encircled Mary’s Rest and the crop field. Except for the occasional howling of dogs, the town was silent, and there was no movement on the stump-stubbled land that lay between the wall and the forest’s edge forty yards away.

About two hours after dawn, a single shot rang out, and a sentry on the eastern section of the wall toppled off his ladder, a bullet hole in his forehead.

The defenders of Mary’s Rest waited for the first attack-but it did not come.

A lookout at the western section of the wall reported seeing movement in the woods, but she couldn’t tell how many soldiers there were. The soldiers slipped back into the forest, and there was no gunfire.

An hour after that, another lookout on the eastern side passed the word that he heard what sounded like heavy machines in the distance, moving through the forest and getting closer.

“Truck’s coming!” one of the sentries on the northern section cried out.

Paul Thorson climbed up a ladder and looked for himself. He heard the scratchy, weirdly merry sound of recorded calliope music. What appeared to be an armored Good Humor truck with two loudspeakers mounted on its cab, an armored windshield and a sheet metal gun turret rumbled slowly along the road from the north.

The music stopped, and as the truck continued to move forward a man’s voice boomed from the two speakers: “People of Mary’s Rest! Listen to the law of the Army of Excellence!” The voice echoed over the town, over the field where the corn was growing and the new apple trees were taking root, over the foundations where the church had stood, over the bonfires and over the shack where Josh lay sleeping. “We don’t want to kill you! Every one of you who wants to join us is welcome! Just come over that wall and join the Army of Excellence! Bring your families, your guns and your food! We don’t want to kill any of you!”

“Riiiight,” Paul muttered under his breath. He had his Magnum cocked and ready.

“We want your crops,” the voice commanded from the speakers as the Good Humor truck rumbled nearer to the north wall. “We want your food and a supply of water. And we want the girl. Bring us the girl called Swan, and we’ll leave the rest of you in peace. Just bring her to us, and we’ll welcome you with loving, open-oh, shit!”

And at that instant the vehicle’s front tires plunged into one of the hidden trenches, and as the rear tires spun in empty air the truck turned on its side and crashed into the ditch.

There was a shout of victory from the other sentries. A minute later, two men scrambled up from the trench and began running in the direction from which they’d come. One of them was limping, unable to keep up, and Paul aimed the Magnum at the center of his spine.

He wanted to pull the trigger. Knew he should kill the bastard while he had the chance. But he didn’t, and he watched as both of the soldiers disappeared into the woods.

A machine gun chattered off to the right. Bullets zigzagged across the wall, cracking through the ice and thunking into the logs and dirt. Paul ducked his head, heard shouting from the eastern section, then the noise of more gunfire, and he knew the first attack had begun. He dared to lift his head, saw about forty more soldiers taking cover at the edge of the woods. They opened fire, but their bullets couldn’t penetrate the wall. Paul kept his head down and held his fire, waiting for a chance to tag one of them when they started across the open ground.

On the eastern side of Mary’s Rest, the sentries saw a wave of perhaps two hundred soldiers coming out of the forest. The AOE infantry shouted and surged forward-and then they began tumbling into the network of hidden trenches, many of them breaking their ankles and legs as they hit bottom. The sentries, all armed with rifles, picked off their targets at random. Two of the sentries were shot and fell, but as soon as they hit the ground others were climbing up the ladders to take their places.

The AOE soldiers, their formation in disarray and men falling everywhere, began to turn back for the cover of the woods and toppled into more ditches and pits. The wounded were crushed under the boots of their companions.

At the same time, more than five hundred soldiers burst from the forest on the western edge of Mary’s Rest, along with dozens of armored cars, trucks and two bulldozers. As they rushed forward in a shouting mass the trenches opened under their feet. One of the bulldozers plunged down and overturned, and an armored car following right behind hit the bulldozer and exploded in a red fireball. Several of the other vehicles were snagged on tree stumps and unable to go either forward or backward. Scores of men tumbled into the ditches, breaking their bones. The lookouts fired as fast as they could select targets, and AOE soldiers fell dead in the snow.

But most of the soldiers and vehicles kept coming, storming the western section of the wall, and behind them was a second wave of another two hundred troops. Machine gun, rifle and pistol fire began to chip at the wall, but still the bullets were turned aside.

“Step up and open fire!” Bud Royce shouted.

And a line of men and women stepped up on the two-foot-high bank of dirt that had been built along the wall’s base, aimed their guns and started shooting.

Anna McClay ran along the wall, shouting, “Step up and give ’em hell!”

A blaze of gunfire erupted along the western wall, and the first wave of AOE soldiers faltered. The second wave crashed into them, and then the vehicles were running men down as they scattered. Officers in armored cars and Jeeps shouted commands, but the troops were panicked. They fled toward the forest, and as Captain Carr stood up in his Jeep to order them back, a bullet pierced his throat and slammed him to the ground.

The attack was over in another few minutes as the soldiers drew back deeper in the woods. Around the walls, the wounded crawled on the ground and the dead lay where they’d fallen. A victorious shout rang up from the defenders along the western wall, but a figure on horseback called out, “No! Stop it! Stop it!”

Tears were streaming down Swan’s cheeks, and the gunfire still echoed in her head. “Stop it!” she shouted as Mule reared with her and pawed the air. She wheeled the horse toward Sister, who stood nearby with her sawed-off shotgun. “Make them stop!” Swan said. “They just killed other people! They shouldn’t be glad about that!”

“They’re not glad about killing other people,” Sister told her. “They’re just glad they weren’t killed.” She motioned toward a man’s corpse that lay ten feet away, shot through the face. Someone else was already taking the dead man’s pistol and bullets. “There’re going to be more of those. If you can’t take what you see, you’d better get inside.”

Swan looked around. A woman was sprawled on the ground, moaning as another woman and man bound up her bullet-shattered wrist with strips torn from a shirt. A few feet away, a dark-haired man lay contorted and dying, coughing up blood as other people tried to comfort him. Swan flinched with horror, her eyes returning to Sister.

Sister was calmly reloading her shotgun. “You’d better go,” she suggested.

Swan was torn; she knew she should be out there with the people who were fighting to protect her, but she couldn’t stand watching the death. The noise of gunfire was a thousand times worse than all the hurting sounds she’d ever experienced.

But before she could decide to go or stay, there was the throaty growl of an engine beyond the wall. Someone shouted, “Jesus Christ! Look at that!”

Sister hurried to the wall, and stepped up on the mound of dirt.

Just emerging from the forest, about twenty yards to Sister’s left, was a tank. Its wide treads crunched over the wounded and dead alike. The snout of its gun was aimed directly at the wall. And dangling all over the tank, like grotesque hood ornaments, were human bones tied to wires-legs, arms, rib cages, hip bones, vertebrae and skulls, some still bearing scalps. The tank stopped right at the edge of the woods, its engine idling like a beast’s snarl.

The tank’s hatch popped open. A hand emerged waving a white handkerchief.

“Hold your fire!” Sister told the others. “Let’s see what they want first!”

A helmeted head came up; the face was bandaged, the eyes covered with goggles. “Who’s in charge over there?” Roland Croninger called toward the row of faces he could see, like disembodied heads perched atop that damned wall.

Some of the others looked at Sister; she didn’t want the responsibility, but she guessed she was it. “I am! What do you want?”

“Peace,” Roland replied. He glanced at the bodies on the ground. “You people did a pretty good job!” He grinned, though inwardly he was shrieking with rage. Friend had said nothing about trenches and a defensive wall! How the hell had these goddamned farmers put together such a barricade? “Nice wall you’ve got there!” he said. “Looks pretty sturdy! Is it?”

“It’ll do!”

“Will it? I wonder how many rounds it would take to knock a hole through it and blow you to Hell, lady.”

“I don’t know!” Sister had a rigid smile on her face, but sweat was running down her sides, and she knew they had no chance at all against that monstrous machine. “How much time do you have?”

“A lot! All the time in the world!” He patted the cannon’s snout. It was too bad, he thought, that there were no shells for the cannon-and even if there were, none of them would know how to load and fire it. The second tank had broken down only a few hours out of Lincoln, and this one had to be driven by a corporal who’d once made his living hauling freight through the Rocky Mountains in a tractor-trailer rig; but even he couldn’t keep control of the big bastard all the time. Still, Roland liked riding in it, because the inside smelled like hot metal and sweat, and he could think of no better warhorse for a King’s Knight. “Hey, lady!” he called. “Why don’t you people give us what we want, and nobody else will get hurt! Okay?”

“It looks to me like you’re the ones getting hurt!”

“Oh, this little scrape? Lady, we haven’t started yet! This was just an exercise! See, now we know where your trenches are! Behind me are a thousand soldiers who’d really like to meet all you fine people! Or I might be wrong: They could be over on the other side, or circling down to the south! They could be anywhere!”

Sister felt sick. There was no way to fight against a tank! She was aware of Swan standing beside her, peering over the wall. “Why don’t you just go on about your business and leave us alone?” Sister asked.

“Our business won’t be done until we’ve gotten what we came for!” Roland said. “We want food, water and the girl! We want your guns and ammunition, and we want them now! Do I make myself clear?”

“Perfectly,” she answered-and then she lifted her shotgun and squeezed the trigger.

The distance was too great for an accurate shot, but pellets rang off Roland’s helmet as he ducked his head through the hatch. The white handkerchief was riddled with buckshot, and a half-dozen pellets had punctured his hand. Cursing and shaking with rage, Roland fell down into the bowels of the tank.

The back of Sister’s neck crawled. She tensed, waiting for the first blast of the cannon-but it didn’t come. The tank’s engine revved, and the vehicle backed over the bodies and tree stumps toward the woods again. Sister’s nerves didn’t stop jangling until the tank had moved out of sight in the underbrush, and only then did she realize that something must be wrong with the tank; otherwise, why hadn’t they just blown a hole right through the wall?

A red flare shot up into the sky from the western woods and exploded over the cornfield.

“Here they come again!” Sister shouted grimly. She glanced at Swan. “You’d better get out of here before it starts.”

Swan looked along the wall at the others who stood ready to fight, and she knew where she should be. “I’ll stay.”

Another flare rose from the eastern woods and burst like a smear of blood against the sky.

Gunfire swept the western wall, and Sister grabbed Swan to pull her behind cover. Bullets slammed against the logs, chips of ice and splinters spinning through the air. About twenty seconds after the first barrage had begun, the AOE soldiers massed in the forest on the eastern side of Mary’s Rest started firing, their bullets doing no major damage but keeping the defenders’ heads down. The shooting continued, and soon bullets were blasting chinks in the walls, some of them ricocheting off the ground, but others hitting flesh.

And on the southern perimeter, the defenders saw more armored cars and trucks emerge from the forest, along with fifty or sixty soldiers. The Army of Excellence rushed the wall. Hidden trenches stopped several vehicles and toppled twenty or more men, but the rest of them kept coming. Two trucks got through the maze of ditches and tree stumps and crashed into the logs. The entire southern section of the wall trembled, but it held. Then the soldiers had covered the open ground and reached the wall, trying to climb over it; their fingers couldn’t grip the ice, and as they slipped back the defenders fired on them point-blank. Those without guns swung axes, picks and sharpened shovels.

Mr. Polowsky climbed up on a dead sentry’s ladder, firing his pistol as fast as he could aim. “Drive them back!” he shouted. He took aim at an enemy soldier, but before he could pull the trigger a rifle bullet plowed into his chest and a second caught him in the side of the head. He fell off the ladder, and at once a woman plucked the pistol from his hand.